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May 2, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180502094658.htm
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Internal control helps corals resist acidification
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Scientists from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at The University of Western Australia (UWA) have found that some corals are able to combat the effects of ocean acidification by controlling their own chemistry.
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Coral reefs play an important role in protecting coastlines from damage caused by waves and storms, but also provide habitat and shelter for many marine organisms. However, major environmental challenges such as climate change, threaten the survival of coral reefs worldwide.The world-first study is a breakthrough for marine science because the scientists have identified marine species that are resilient to ocean changes, which will help better understand how to protect coral reefs in the future.Lead author Dr Thomas DeCarlo said rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere were reflected in the ocean, which leads to ocean acidification."Acidification hampers the ability of the coral to form skeletons and shells which are the building blocks of reefs," Dr DeCarlo said."In the past few decades, hundreds of experiments have shown that corals have a highly diverse response to ocean acidification depending on the species. However, the reasons why some are more tolerant than others are not clearly understood.Dr DeCarlo and his team developed a new method to understand the internal chemistry of corals by using specialised equipment that measures the characteristics of the molecules in coral."The method showed corals with the most resistance are tolerant because of the way they are able to regulate their calcium levels," Dr DeCarlo said. "This technique means scientists can identify species that are relatively resistant to ocean acidification.""However, we are also looking at the costs associated with resisting acidification, which may potentially make acidification-resistant corals more vulnerable to other stressors."Co-author Professor Malcolm McCulloch said previous studies found that even the more hardy coral species lose their ability to adapt to ocean acidification when they bleach under extreme heat events, as experienced in 2016."When a coral bleaches, it expels its 'powerhouse' -- zooxanthellae symbionts, and loses the energy needed to keep its internal mechanisms running," he said. "The longer corals stay bleached, the less likely they are to recover."
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New Species
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April 30, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180430132003.htm
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Citizen scientists discover a new water beetle and name it after Leonardo DiCaprio
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New animal species are sometimes named after celebrities because of their trademark looks. That's how we got the blonde-haired Donald Trump moth and the big-armed Arnold Schwarzenegger fly, to name a few. However, some well-known people are enshrined in animal names not for their looks, but rather for what they do for the environment.
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This is exactly how a newly discovered water beetle, described in the open access journal The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has become one of the world's foremost wildlife charities, having contributed to over 200 grassroots projects around the globe devoted to climate change mitigation, wildlife conservation, and habitat preservation."We can all have an impact," says DiCaprio in a special LDF video, "but we have to work together to protect our only home."Going by the scientific name of Having identified a total of three water beetle species new to science, the expedition participants and the local staff of the Maliau Basin Studies Centre voted to name one of them after DiCaprio in honour of his efforts to protect untouched, unexplored wildernesses just like Maliau Basin itself."Tiny and black, this new beetle may not win any Oscars for charisma, but in biodiversity conservation, every creature counts," said Taxon Expeditions' founder and entomologist Dr. Iva Njunjic.Founded in 2017 and based in Leiden, The Netherlands, Taxon Expeditions is an organization which focuses on education and biodiversity discovery. It organizes expeditions to remote areas for people interested in nature and science and help them make scientific discoveries. International experts are engaged to guide them through all steps of real scientific research. Together, they discover, name, and publish completely new species of wild animals.With only 20% of the world's species estimated to be currently known despite the last 250 years spent in research conducted by professionals, the mission of Taxon Expeditions is to harness the power of citizen science for biodiversity discovery and its conservation.In 1998, Leonardo DiCaprio established his foundation with the mission of protecting the world's last wild places. LDF implements solutions that help restore balance to threatened ecosystems, ensuring the long-term health and well-being of all Earth's inhabitants. Since that time the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation (LDF) has worked on some of the most pressing environmental issues of our day through grantmaking, public campaigns and media initiatives.The Foundation has gradually built a significant grantmaking operation, awarding over $80 million in grants since 2010, funding 200+ high-impact projects in 50 countries across Asia, the Americas, Africa, the Arctic, Antarctica, and all five oceans. Through active collaboration with a broad network of environmental leaders and experts, effective organizations, and committed philanthropists, the foundation is able to find and support the best, results-driven projects in the world's most wild and threatened ecosystems. Its work is divided into six main program areas -- Wildlands Conservation, Oceans Conservation, Climate Change, Indigenous Rights, Transforming California, and Innovative Solutions.
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New Species
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April 25, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180425093733.htm
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We still don't know how strange celibate animals evolve
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A new study has cast doubt on leading theory for how tiny creatures have evolved for tens of millions of years -- without ever having sex.
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Most animals reproduce sexually, a process which shuffles genes from parent to offspring. This makes natural selection more efficient and allows animals to evolve defences against changing environmental conditions more rapidly, especially new diseases.Bdelloid rotifers however appear to be an exception to this rule: they are all female, and their offspring are clones of their mothers. Bdelloids are microscopic animals that live in freshwater and damp habitats across the world. Despite their apparent lack of sex, we know they have evolved for tens of millions of years into more than 500 species.By studying their genomes -- the set of all the genes that define an animal's characteristics -- researchers thought they had identified an explanation for how bdelloids had 'gotten away' with no sex for millions of years.However, a new study, published today in Many species of bdelloid endure periods of drying out, called desiccation. Although they survive desiccation, the process damages their DNA, which they need to repair when rehydrated.Based on a previous study of the genome of a species that survives desiccation, researchers had proposed that the repair of DNA might remove some of the problems of being asexual, for example by removing harmful mutations and possibly allowing occasional recombination of genes to occur.This theory made key predictions about what the genomes of the small number of bdelloid species that cannot survive desiccation should look like. The new study looked at the genomes of three further species, including some that do not undergo desiccation.The researchers found that the predicted differences between species that can and cannot survive desiccation were not observed. This suggests that DNA repair following desiccation may not be as important as previously thought, and that other factors may need to be considered to explain bdelloid evolution.Senior researcher Professor Tim Barraclough, from the Department of Life Science at Imperial, said: "We have been building up this story of how these creatures manage to change based on their remarkable ability to survive desiccation."However, when we open up the investigation to other sexless species of bdelloid that do not dry out, we find that the story does not play out. We thought we were understanding more about these creatures, but this is a spanner in the works."Although the latest study shows that desiccation is not key to genome changes, the team did confirm that all the species investigated so far show unusual levels of 'horizontal gene transfer' -- which means they incorporate and use foreign DNA from distantly related organisms in their genomes.Bdelloid species are known to have taken up thousands of genes from plants, bacteria, fungi, and single-celled organisms. Different species appear to have adapted to their unique environments by taking up DNA that benefits their survival, providing another route to evolution.It is not known exactly how bdelloids incorporate foreign DNA, but DNA repair following desiccation has been proposed as one route for those species that undergo drying out. Next, the team want to look more closely at these foreign genes for clues as to how they were acquired.They also want to study the genomes of individuals within the same population over time to see how their genomes change.Finally, although no males have ever been found, this new study of rotifers' genomes suggests scientists can't rule out sex as firmly as previously thought. Previous evidence had suggested that the structure of the bdelloid genome made conventional sex impossible.Sexual animals have two copies of each gene arranged along matching chromosomes, one from the father and one from the mother. The first bdelloid genome sequenced revealed that the two copies of genes were often on the same chromosome, which is incompatible with their inheritance on chromosomes from a father and a mother. The new study, however, did not find these same patterns in the three new genomes.Lead author Dr Reuben Nowell said: "We haven't proved they are having sex, it's just that we can't prove that they aren't based on the current genome results. Other species of rotifers have identifiable males, but no bdelloid rotifer males have ever been found."We will continue to investigate these fascinating creatures, but for now, the mystery has only deepened."
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New Species
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April 23, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180423110831.htm
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Five new blanket-hermit crab species described 130 years later from the Pacific
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At the turn of the twentieth century, two independent marine scientists -- JR Henderson in 1888, and A Alcock in 1899, described two unusual blanket-hermit crabs from the Indo-West Pacific.
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Unlike other hermit crabs, these extraordinary crustaceans do not search for empty shells to settle in for protection. Instead, they have developed a symbiotic relationship with sea anemones to cover their soft bellies. To do this, the crabs use highly specialized chelipeds to pull back and forth the anemone's tissue to cover their soft bodies and heads whenever necessary -- much like hiding under a blanket.Among the numerous specimens collected during the famous HMS Challenger Expedition in 1874, there were two hermit crab specimens obtained from the Philippines. They amazed Henderson with their unusual physical characters, including an abdomen bent on itself rather than spirally curved, and the lack of any trace of either a shell or other kind of protective structure for their body.As a result, in 1888, JR Henderson established a brand new genus and new species for it as A decade later, unaware of the previous discovery, A Alcock stumbled upon hundreds of hermit crab specimens off southern India, which exhibited quite spectacular behaviour. Having observed their symbiotic relations with sea anemones, the researcher also formally described in 1899 a new species and a new genus for his specimens.However, shortly thereafter and upon learning of JR Henderson's earlier work, A Alcock concluded that his hermit crab specimens and those of JR Henderson must be one and the same species, so the two scientific names were officially synonymized in 1901 in a publication with his colleague AF McArdle, with JR Henderson's name taking precedence as required by the principle of priority set forth in the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature.Now, 130 years later, an international team of scientists, led by invertebrate zoologist Dr Rafael Lemaitre of the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, USA, not only found that A Alcock's Indian specimens were indeed a separate species, leading to the resurrection of its name as In their recent publication in the open access journal To develop their exceptional symbiosis with sea anemones, the blanket-hermit crabs have obviously needed just as extraordinary evolutionary adaptations. Perhaps the most remarkable of these are their specialized chelate fourth legs that allow for the crustaceans to effectively grab and stretch the thin-walled body of the anemones to cover themselves. For five of the species, the scientists report and unusual grasping shape for this cheliped that is reminiscent of bear claws, while in the other two the shape resembles ice-block tongs.Unfortunately, the identity of the sea anemone species involved in the symbiotic relationship with any of the studied blanket-hermit crabs is currently uncertain, and their biology remains unknown.So far, the genus described by JR Henderson as Paguropsis, contains five species distributed in the subtropical and tropical Indo-West Pacific, and living at depths ranging from 30 to 1125 m. These include the two species discovered in the 19th century, and three new species, one of which, For two of the newly discovered hermit crabs, the new genus Paguropsina is erected to reflect the numerous similarities between the two species and their "Here there is no shell to play the part of 'Sir Pandarus of Troy,' but the sea-anemone settles upon the hinder part of the young hermit-crab's tail, and the two animals grow up together, in such a way that the spreading zoophytes form a blanket which the hermit can either draw completely forwards over its head or throw half-back, as it pleases," Alcock once eloquently described his marine discovery.
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New Species
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April 23, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180423085429.htm
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Trichomonosis discovered amongst myna birds in Pakistan
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A strain of the disease responsible for killing off nearly two thirds of the UK's greenfinches has been discovered in myna bird populations in Pakistan.
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Mynas are native to the Indian subcontinent and are one of the world's most invasive species. Although the disease is not generally fatal to them, experts from the University of East Anglia studying the birds say there is a risk they might pass it on to other species.Avian trichomonosis, more commonly called canker or frounce, is carried by a parasite that primarily infects pigeons in the UK and the larger birds of prey which feed on them.But in 2005 scientists found the disease had jumped into Britain's garden songbird populations, predominantly affecting greenfinches and chaffinches.Since then, the greenfinch population in the UK has fallen from around 4.3 million breeding pairs to fewer than 1.5 million in 2016.In 2011, the disease was discovered to have reached European finch populations. Now researchers at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have found it in an entirely separate songbird species - the common myna.Working in partnership with the University of Agriculture in Pakistan, researchers captured and screened 167 myna birds from eight different sites around the Faisalabad region of Pakistan. They discovered that around 20 per cent of the birds were infected with the disease and that there were infected birds at all of the sites surveyed.The study, published in the journal Because myna birds are so invasive, however, there is a significant risk that they can spread the disease to other species that might not otherwise come into contact with it.Dr Kevin Tyler, from UEA and a senior author of the study, said: "Mynas are able to roost almost anywhere in warm climates, which is one reason they are so successful, but it could also mean they are likely to spread the disease further."Mynas have already been implicated in the spread of bird flu through contact with poultry, so this could be of concern to poultry farmers. However, further research and testing is needed to see whether the disease has yet spread from mynas to other species."He added: "In the UK, pigeons carry this disease without serious symptoms and it looks like myna birds are able to do the same. This could be due to a natural resilience to the disease, or it could be that this is a less virulent strain - again, we need to carry out further research to investigate."Although mynas are thought to be native to the Indian subcontinent, populations of the birds have spread around the world, so the team is also keen to test for the disease in other countries.'Endemic infection of the common mynah Acridotheres tristis with Trichomonas gallinae the agent of avian trichomonosis', by Hassan Ali Farooq, Hammad Ahmad Khan, Abdulwahed Fahad Alrefaei and Kevin Morris Tyler, is published in
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New Species
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April 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419233828.htm
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Bottlenose dolphins recorded for the first time in Canadian Pacific waters
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A large group of common bottlenose dolphins (
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On 29 July 2017, researchers from Halpin Wildlife Research, in collaboration with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, Canada and the Department of Environment and Climate Change, Canada, observed a group of approximately 200 common bottlenose dolphins and roughly 70 false killer whales (Luke Halpin, lead author of the paper, said: 'It is surprising to find a warm-water dolphin in British Columbian waters, and especially to find such a large number of common bottlenose dolphins within the group."Halpin added: "The sighting is also the first offshore report of false killer whales in British Columbia. To see the two species traveling together and interacting was quite special and rare. It is known that common bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales seek each other out and interact, but the purpose of the interactions is unclear."Both common bottlenose dolphins and false killer whales typically live in warm temperate waters further south in the eastern North Pacific, but this sighting suggests that they will naturally range into British Columbia, Canada when conditions are suitable. There has been a warming trend in eastern North Pacific waters from 2013-2016 and the authors hypothesize that the trend may be the reason behind this unusual sighting.Halpin adds: "Since 2014 I have documented several warm-water species: common bottlenose dolphins, a swordfish and a loggerhead turtle in British Columbian waters. With marine waters increasingly warming up we can expect to see more typically warm-water species in the northeastern Pacific."
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New Species
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April 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419141520.htm
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Great Barrier Reef coral predicted to last at least 100 years before extinction from climate change
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A common Great Barrier Reef coral species has enough genetic diversity to survive at least 100 years before succumbing to global warming predicts Mikhail Matz of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues. They report these findings in a new study published April 19th, 2018 in
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A warming climate, ocean acidification and destruction of coral habitats have all taken a significant toll on coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef. Previous studies offered hope that corals can adapt to warming conditions but no one knows if they can outpace climate change. Matz and his colleagues developed a model to estimate the ability of the common coral species This study of a common inhabitant of the Great Barrier Reef is a rare optimistic contribution to our understanding of how a species can adapt to changing climate conditions. The findings show that recent catastrophic coral bleaching events do not necessary signal imminent coral demise and can also inform reef management strategies, suggesting that interventions that help reshuffle coral genetic diversity among reefs will likely increase the coral's odds for survival in the near future.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
April 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180419131116.htm
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New ant species from Borneo explodes to defend its colony
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Amongst the countless fascinating plants and animals inhabiting the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia, there are the spectacular "exploding ants," a group of arboreal, canopy dwelling ants nicknamed for their unique defensive behaviour.
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When threatened by other insects, minor workers can actively rupture their body wall. Apart from leading to the ants' imminent death, the "explosion" releases a sticky, toxic liquid from their enlarged glands, in order to either kill or hold off the enemy.Curiously enough, while these ants' peculiar behaviour was first mentioned in distant 1916, no new species have been formally described since 1935, due to insufficient evidence. Instead, scientists used to simply refer to them as the members of a remarkable species group -- That was until an interdisciplinary research team from Austria, Thailand and Brunei came together led by their shared fascination with these insects and their extraordinary mechanism of self-sacrifice (also called autothysis) in 2014. Thus, entomologists, botanists, microbiologists, and chemists from the Natural History Museum Vienna, Technical University Vienna, IFA Tulln and Universiti Brunei Darussalam together identified roughly 15 separate species of exploding ants, with one of them now described as new to science in the open access journal Aptly named Being a "model species" means that the ant will serve as an important navigation point in future studies on exploding ants. Publications regarding their behaviour, chemical profile, microbiology, anatomy and evolution are currently in preparation, say the authors. In addition, there are several more new species expected to be described in the near future.While minor workers exhibit the ability to "explode," the other castes have specialities of their own. For example, major workers (also called "doorkeepers") have big, plug-shaped heads used to physically barricade the nest entrances against intruders.During a sampling trip to Brunei in 2015, project members Alexey Kopchinskiy and Alice Laciny even managed to observe queens and males on a mating flight. They sampled the first males of these ants ever to be seen.The same expedition was used to record the ants' activity schedule and conduct the first experiments on food preferences and exploding behaviour.While the exploding ants play a dominant role in rainforests, their biology still holds a number of secrets. The observations and experiments conducted on the newly described species have laid important groundwork for future research that will uncover even more details about these enigmatic explosive insects.Watch this video to observe the behaviour of the exploding ants in various settings.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
April 18, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180418100507.htm
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New new genus and species of extinct baleen whale identified
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University of Otago palaeontologists are rewriting the history of New Zealand's ancient whales by describing a previously unknown genus of baleen whale, alive more than 27.5 million years ago and found in the Hakataramea Valley.
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The new genus and species of extinct baleen whale is based on a skull and associated bones unearthed from the Kokoamu Greensand, a noted fossil-bearing rock unit in the South Canterbury and Waitaki district from the Oligocene period, which extends from about 33.9 million to 23 million years ago. At this time, New Zealand was an archipelago surrounded by shallow, richly productive seas.Former PhD student in the University of Otago's Department of Geology, Cheng-Hsiu Tsai and his supervisor, Professor Ewan Fordyce, have named the new genus Professor Fordyce says the discovery is significant in New Zealand's fossil history."This is a pretty old whale that goes almost half-way back to the age of the dinosaurs. We are tracking whale history back through time," Professor Fordyce explains."This newly-named whale lived about 27.5 million years ago. It's about as old a common ancestor as we have for the living baleen whales like the minke whales and the right whales."Baleen whales are a group of Mysticeti, large whales usually from colder waters that lack teeth but have baleen plates in the upper jaw which are used to filter food such as krill out of large quantities of seawater.The fossil was actually recovered from the Hakataramea Valley in South Canterbury 30 years ago in January 1988. However, it was only worked up in recent years with Dr Tsai -- who is now currently working at the National Taiwan University -- beginning his thesis only a few years ago. The thesis provided the analytical framework to identify and name the new whale.The research paper announcing the new archaic baleen whale was published today in the scientific journal While the skeleton of the whale was disarticulated when it was excavated, the bones were closely associated, which gave the palaeontologists plenty of material to work with. In particular, the highly diagnostic earbones were preserved, helping with identification.The skull was about one metre long and the body about five metres, which means it was a reasonably small species, Professor Fordyce says. "That's about half the size of an adult minke whale."It was previously known that the baleen whales can take on board thousands of litres of water in the lower jaws which they scoop open to get great mouthfuls of water and food. The researchers were not able to determine how this whale died. Professor Fordyce says it could have been attacked by a shark, stranded on a beach or died of disease. When it died, it sank to the bottom of the sea floor with its skeleton falling apart and becoming a hub for coral and other organisms to grow on.Professor Fordyce expects the ancient whales' history books may keep being rewritten in years to come."We are pretty sure there are some species [of baleen whale] that will be older than these. But right now it anchors the modern baleen whale lineage to at least 27.5 million years."The
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New Species
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April 18, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180418144732.htm
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Better species mapping can improve conservation efforts
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The scientific models that ecologists and conservation biologists rely on to determine which species and habitats to protect lack critical information to help them make effective decisions, according to a new study.
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Angela Strecker, an environmental science professor at Portland State University and the study's co-lead author, said that species distribution models can help predict all the places where a given species could live based on their environmental preferences, and using these models can help target conservation efforts to areas where they would have the most impact. They can also be useful in predicting where non-native or invasive species may spread."There's limited dollars and opportunities for conserving land and water, so we want to make sure we're getting the most bang for our buck," said Strecker, who co-led the study with a researcher from Bryn Mawr College. "To do that, we often need to rely on the results of these distribution models, but they're biased in terms of not fully representing all of the diversity that's out there and not including other factors that are important."Among the findings of the study, which analyzed more than 300 species distribution models published between 2003 and 2015:-Species in Africa and Asia as well as in freshwater and marine ecosystems were understudied, compared with terrestrial organisms in Europe and North America-Studies largely focused on plants, birds and mammals, with little coverage of other groups such as fish, amphibians and reptiles-Nearly half of the studies did not take into account how climate change may affect an ecosystem and whether different species would be able to survive-Scientists have been slow to incorporate biological factors such as the dispersal, or migration, capability of a species and its interactions with other organismsFor example, when scientists use models to map the distribution of plants, Strecker said, they also need to consider the species such as birds and hummingbirds that pollinate them."If the animals aren't there to pollinate the plants, then the plants won't survive," she said. "No organism is isolated from any other organism. It's missed opportunities to provide more global conservation relevance."
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New Species
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April 17, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180417155615.htm
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Marine fish won an evolutionary lottery 66 million years ago
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Why do our oceans contain such a staggering diversity of fish of so many different sizes, shapes and colors? A UCLA-led team of biologists reports that the answer dates back 66 million years, when a six-mile-wide asteroid crashed to Earth, wiping out the dinosaurs and approximately 75 percent of the world's animal and plant species.
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Slightly more than half of today's fish are "marine fish," meaning they live in oceans. And most marine fish, including tuna, halibut, grouper, sea horses and mahi-mahi, belong to an extraordinarily diverse group called acanthomorphs. (The study did not analyze the large numbers of other fish that live in lakes, rivers, streams, ponds and tropical rainforests.)The aftermath of the asteroid crash created an enormous evolutionary void, providing an opportunity for the marine fish that survived it to greatly diversify."Today's rich biodiversity among marine fish shows the fingerprints of the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period," said Michael Alfaro, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the UCLA College and lead author of the study.To analyze those fingerprints, the "evolutionary detectives" employed a new genomics research technique developed by one of the authors. Their work is published in the journal When they studied the timing of the acanthomorphs' diversification, Alfaro and his colleagues discovered an intriguing pattern: Although there were many other surviving lineages of acanthomorphs, the six most species-rich groups of acanthomorphs today all showed evidence of substantial evolutionary change and proliferation around the time of the mass extinction. Those six groups have gone on to produce almost all of the marine fish diversity that we see today, Alfaro said.He added that it's unclear why the other acanthomorph lineages failed to diversify as much after the mass extinction."The mass extinction, we argue, provided an evolutionary opportunity for a select few of the surviving acanthomorphs to greatly diversify, and it left a large imprint on the biodiversity of marine fishes today," Alfaro said. "It's like there was a lottery 66 million years ago, and these six major acanthomorph groups were the winners."The findings also closely match fossil evidence of acanthomorphs' evolution, which also shows a sharp rise in their anatomical diversity after the extinction.The genomic technique used in the study, called sequence capture of DNA ultra-conserved elements, was developed at UCLA by Brant Faircloth, who is now an assistant professor of biological sciences at Louisiana State University. Where previous methods used just 10 to 20 genes to create an evolutionary history, Faircloth's approach creates a more complete and accurate picture by using more than 1,000 genetic markers. (The markers include genes and other DNA components, such as parts of the DNA that turn proteins on or off, and cellular components that play a role in regulating genes.)The researchers also extracted DNA from 118 species of marine fish and conducted a computational analysis to determine the relationships among them. Among their findings: It's not possible to tell which species are genetically related simply by looking at them. Seahorses, for example, look nothing like goatfish, but the two species are evolutionary cousins -- a finding that surprised the scientists."We demonstrate this approach works, and that it sheds new light on evolutionary history for the most species-rich group of marine vertebrates," Alfaro said.
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New Species
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April 17, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180417155609.htm
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Smooth dance moves confirm new bird-of-paradise species
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Newly publicized audiovisuals support full species status for one of the dancing birds-of-paradise in New Guinea. This new species, called the Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise, is found only in the island's far-western Bird's Head, or Vogelkop, region. In a new paper published in the journal
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"After you see what the Vogelkop form looks like and acts like in the wild, there's little room for doubt that it is a separate species," says Ed Scholes with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birds-of-Paradise Project. "The courtship dance is different. The vocalizations are different. The females look different. Even the shape of the displaying male is different."When expanded for courtship display, the Vogelkop male's raised cape creates a completely different appearance -- crescent-shaped with pointed tips rather than the oval shape of the widespread form of the species. The way the Vogelkop male dances for the female is also is distinctive, the steps being smooth instead of bouncy.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
April 17, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180417130106.htm
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A new Listeria species from Costa Rica
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<em>Listeria costaricensis</em>
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While the new species
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New Species
| 2,018 |
April 13, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180413144555.htm
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Newly identified bacteria may help bees nourish their young
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A team of researchers at the University of California, Riverside have isolated three previously unknown bacterial species from wild bees and flowers. The bacteria, which belong to the genus
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The results were published Thursday in the Symbiotic bacteria that live in bee guts are believed to promote bee health by helping to digest food and boost immunity. Compared to honeybees and bumblebees, little is known about the microbial communities associated with wild bees, despite the important role these insects play in the pollination of flowering plants.To study the bacteria associated with wild bees, McFrederick and co-authors collected wild bees and flowers from two sites in Texas and on the UCR campus. Genomic DNA sequencing coupled with traditional taxonomic analyses confirmed the isolation of three new "Wild bees lay their eggs inside chambers filled with nectar and pollen," McFrederick said. Once an egg has been laid, it may take several days to hatch and an additional week for the larvae to eat through all the nectar and pollen, so it is important that these provisions don't spoil during this period."McFrederick said it is interesting that the bacteria were able to live on both wild flowers and bees."The species we isolated have fairly small genomes and not as many genes as you would expect considering they survive in two different environments," McFrederick said.
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New Species
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April 13, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180413093836.htm
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Crowded urban areas have fewer songbirds per person
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People in crowded urban areas -- especially poor areas -- see fewer songbirds such as tits and finches, and more potential "nuisance" birds, such as pigeons, magpies and gulls, new research shows.
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The University of Exeter and the British Trust for Ornithology examined ratios of birds-to-people and found areas of high-density housing have fewer birds overall -- and the birds people do see are just as likely to cause a nuisance as to make them happy.Meanwhile, people in green and leafy suburbs see up to three and a half times more songbirds and woodpeckers -- which are associated with a positive impact on human wellbeing -- than birds whose behaviours can cause a nuisance.Previous research has suggested that people living in neighbourhoods with more birds, shrubs and trees are less likely to suffer from depression, anxiety and stress."For most people, birds provide their most common encounter with wild animals," said research fellow Dr Daniel Cox, of the Environment and Sustainability Institute at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall."Understanding the relationship between the numbers of birds and people is important for how we manage nature and wildlife in towns and cities to promote positive nature experiences, while minimising the potential for conflict."There are many ways for people to attract birds to the garden to gain positive nature experiences, not only for you and your family but also for the households around you who will also have an increased chance of seeing these birds."We are not saying that all individuals of species such as pigeons, gulls, crows and magpies cause problems -- many will provide people with positive experiences -- but the behaviours of some individuals of these species can cause problems, such as noise, mess and smell."The study conducted extensive bird surveys across three towns in England: Milton Keynes, Luton and Bedford.The researchers then analysed how the numbers and types of birds varied with human population density.They looked at the ratios of birds to people of species that are generally positive for our wellbeing, such as species that can be attracted to garden bird feeders like tits and finches, and species of bird whose behaviours can cause a nuisance.Overall, they found 1.1 birds per person that make us happy, and 0.4 birds per person whose behaviours commonly cause a nuisance."Many people have different favourite birds, of course, but some species are more popular than others and we all benefit from having species that we perceive positively nearby," added Dr Gavin Siriwardena of the British Trust for Ornithology."As well as individual people attracting birds directly by feeding them, a novel approach to planning and development could see design of green spaces to maximize interactions with the wildlife they like."This could mean habitats like ponds and woodland integrated with new developments, but avoiding features that support nuisance species."The study, published in the
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New Species
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April 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180412141020.htm
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Viruses can evolve in parallel in related species
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Viruses are more likely to evolve in similar ways in related species -- raising the risk that they will "jump" from one species to another, new research shows.
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Scientists from the universities of Exeter and Cambridge compared viruses that evolved in different species and found "parallel genetic changes" were more likely if two host species were closely related.The findings suggest that when a new virus appears in a species such as chimpanzees, closely related species like humans may become vulnerable too.Such jumps, also known as host shifts, are a major source of infectious disease, with viruses such as HIV, Ebola and SARS coronavirus all thought to have jumped into humans from other species.The researchers used deep sequencing of genomes to track the evolution of viruses in 19 species of flies. "Our findings show that when a virus adapts to one host, it might also become better adapted to closely related host species," said Dr Ben Longdon, of the University of Exeter."This may explain in part why host shifts tend to occur between related species. However, we sometimes see the same mutations occurring in distantly related host species, and this may help explain why viruses may sometimes jump between distantly related host species."At present we know very little about how viruses shift from one host species to another, so research like this is important if we want to understand and ultimately predict emerging viral diseases."The fruit flies used in the study were 19 species from the
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April 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180412102905.htm
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Deeper understanding of species roles in ecosystems
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A species' traits define the role it plays in the ecosystem in which it lives -- this is the conclusion of a study carried out by researchers at Linköping University, Sweden. New methods can make it easier to predict the ecological role that a species will play when it is introduced, by accident or design, into a new habitat.
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How is an ecosystem affected when one or several species die out, or a new species invades and disturbs the ecological system? In order to predict how complex ecosystems will react to disturbances, it is important to understand how species influence each other. Theoretical ecology approaches such ecological questions with the aid of mathematical models. A new theoretical ecology study, published in the scientific journal One method to deal with this complexity is to describe the system as a food web, where the nodes represent the different species and the links correspond to interactions between them. An interaction may be, for example, that one species feeds on another, that an insect pollinates certain plants, or that a parasite attacks certain hosts."Research on ecological networks has focused on how direct interactions like predation are controlled by species traits such as body size. We have taken this idea one step further and looked at how the ecological role of a species, or in other words its pattern of direct and indirect interactions, is controlled by its traits," says Anna Eklöf, senior lecturer in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology and leader of the study.It is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult to measure who feeds on whom in the natural world and how each species is affected by the feeding patterns of other species. It is, thus, a great advantage if we can take a shortcut and predict the role of a species in an ecosystem based on its known traits without knowing all of its interactions with other species."More accurate prediction of the ecological roles of species based on their traits can also help us to predict the roles of species when they are introduced, by accident or design, into new habitats," says Alyssa Cirtwill, postdoc in the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Biology and principal author of the article.The researchers started by identifying all the possible combinations of interactions for three species in a food web. These patterns are known as "motifs" and are used within many fields of research to analyse networks and to mirror functions within the network.The researchers defined the ecological role of a species in an ecosystem as the number of times the species appears in different locations in different motifs. They used data from six complex marine food webs, from the tropics to the poles, and looked for correlations between the ecological roles of species and some easily-collected traits. Species' traits and their roles did turn out to be related, and the researchers discovered that the environment in which a species seeks its prey is particularly important."You'd expect this, since a predator-prey interaction between two species requires first and foremost that they meet in the same environment. This requirement, however, is not always included in the models used to predict interactions. Our results demonstrate how important it is to include factors that influence the choice of environment in which a species seeks its prey," says Anna Eklöf.The study has looked at marine ecosystems, and more research is needed to determine whether the roles of species in land-based habitats depend on their traits in the same way."It's easy to use our methods in other systems, and we hope that our study will inspire others to look at other systems in the future" says Anna Eklöf.
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April 11, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180411111052.htm
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Biodiversity: 3 new rainbow chameleon species discovered
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The diversity of Madagascar is unique. More than 420 reptile species are already known from this enormous island off the east coast of Madagascar, yet rainforested mountains across the island continue to yield new surprises: On an expedition carried out by the Zoologische Staatssammlung Munich in a remote area of northern Madagascar, a team of researchers has discovered a spectacularly coloured rainbow chameleon, now dubbed
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While the new rainbow chameleon is found only in the relatively remote forests of the north of Madagascar, a second new species was discovered in a dwindling forest fragment just beside one of the island's most heavily travelled roads. This totally isolated forest fragment, which covers an area of scarcely 15 hectares, is the only known forest in which Only a single, male specimen of the third species described in the new study, "Based on everything we know about these species, they all have very small distribution ranges," says Dr. Frank Glaw, who heads the Herpetology Section of the Zoologische Staatssammlung München, "but many new protected areas are now being established in Madagascar, which will certainly be important for the future of Madagascar's unique diversity." (ZSM/LMU)
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April 6, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180406112221.htm
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Species hitch a ride on birds and the wind to join green roof communities
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New research suggests that species that live on green roofs arrived by hitching lifts on birds or by riding air currents.
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While green roofs are seen as being great for biodiversity, adding habitat to what would otherwise be a bare roof, they can be harsh environments with high winds and extremes of temperature that make them vulnerable to drought. Because they are high, they can also be inaccessible to species that can't fly, in particular soil organisms which are crucial for nutrient cycling and sustainable plant growth.Yet previous research shows that these species do live on roofs. So how do they get there?The study, by Dr Heather Rumble, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Geography at the University of Portsmouth and Dr Paul Finch and Professor Alan Gange from Royal Holloway, University of London, aimed to find out whether soil organisms, such as mites, springtails (tiny insect-like creatures), bacteria and fungi are introduced to green roofs in their building materials or arrive on a green roof via other mechanisms, like travelling on birds or in "aerial plankton" (tiny creatures riding air currents).They monitored a new green roof constructed within the grounds of Royal Holloway from September 2011 to July 2012. Soil micro-organisms living in the construction materials (substrates and plant plugs) were monitored to see if they would colonise the green roof.Dr Rumble said: "We found that while there was a healthy soil community in construction materials, most species died off soon after the roof was constructed due to the harsh conditions. This means that green roof soil species must arrive via another mechanism, such as by hitching lifts on birds or by coming in the aerial plankton."The researchers provide two important recommendations from the study. The first is that engineering soils for green roofs needs more work to ensure that not only the physical aspects (like the soil structure) are right, but also that the biology is right. Ensuring soil biology is adapted to green roofs from the start could make green roofs more sustainable.Dr Rumble said: "This is important, because as a completely human-made environment, getting the soil community right in the construction materials could ensure that the roof is sustainable in the long term."The second recommendation is that, because at the moment most species are getting to the roof under their own steam, more research is needed to help this, perhaps by combining green roofs and living walls to ensure green roofs are connected to ground level soils.The research, published in the journal
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April 4, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180404133510.htm
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Ancient origins of viruses discovered
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Research published today in
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The study, a collaboration between the University of Sydney, the China Center for Disease Control and Prevention and the Shanghai Public Health Clinical Centre, looked for RNA viruses in 186 vertebrate species previously ignored when it came to viral infections.The researchers discovered 214 novel RNA viruses (where the genomic material is RNA rather than DNA) in apparently healthy reptiles, amphibians, lungfish, ray-finned fish, cartilaginous fish and jawless fish."This study reveals some groups of virus have been in existence for the entire evolutionary history of the vertebrates -- it transforms our understanding of virus evolution," said Professor Eddie Holmes, of the Marie Bashir Institute for Infectious Diseases & Biosecurity at the University of Sydney."For the first time we can definitely show that RNA viruses are many millions of years old, and have been in existence since the first vertebrates existed."Fish, in particular, carry an amazing diversity of viruses, and virtually every type of virus family detected in mammals is now found in fish. We even found relatives of both Ebola and influenza viruses in fish."However, Professor Holmes was also quick to emphasise that these fish viruses do not pose a risk to human health and should be viewed as a natural part of virus biodiversity."This study emphasises just how big the universe of viruses -- the virosphere -- really is. Viruses are everywhere."It is clear that there are still many millions more viruses still to be discovered," he said.The newly discovered viruses appeared in every family or genus of RNA virus associated with vertebrate infection, including those containing human pathogens such as influenza virus.Because the evolutionary histories of the viruses generally matched those of their vertebrates, the researchers were able to conclude that these viruses had long evolutionary histories.
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April 3, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403140400.htm
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Microbiome study suggests marine nematodes are not picky eaters
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The ocean floors are literally crawling with nematode worms. A square meter of sediment can contain millions of worms from hundreds of species.
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In such tight quarters, how does everyone get enough to eat? University of California, Riverside researchers investigated whether microbiomes -- microbial communities that are associated with larger hosts -- might play a role. Since gut microbes help with food breakdown, perhaps different species have evolved different microbiomes to reduce competition and promote co-existence.It turns out that's not the case. As reported Friday in Although there has been little research on the microbiomes of invertebrates, Bik's findings differ from previous studies in other nematode species (including those raised in laboratory conditions) and insects, where particular microbial profiles appear to cluster within families. The turtle ant, for example, survives on a diet of hard-to-digest food that is low in nutrients. Without its unique gut microbiome, which helps in the breakdown of inaccessible nutrients, the ants would have to compete with other species for more readily available food sources.Bik's team examined 281 individual worms from 33 genera that were collected from off the coasts of Southern California, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic. The team meticulously isolated individual worms, which they first characterized under a microscope (nematodes have traditionally been classified into four "feeding groups" based on their mouthparts) and then by DNA analysis. The DNA analysis provided a genetic snapshot of individual nematodes' microbiomes, including bacteria, protists, fungi, and other microscopic organisms. The microbes associated with each nematode could provide information on the gut microbiome, parasites, or partially digested food that is representative of each species.They found that there was no relationship between how closely nematodes were related -- or how similar they looked -- and their microbial profiles. There was also no correlation in the microbiomes of nematodes isolated from the same geographic areas."Our results suggest that in marine habitats, free-living nematodes may utilize more diverse and generalist foraging strategies than previously thought," Bik said.Bik said an unexpected and interesting finding was the previously undiscovered association between nematodes and several parasites, including slime molds that have been reported as parasites of other marine invertebrates. Another finding was the frequent association between nematodes and bacteria that play important roles in nutrient cycling, an essential ecological process for life on Earth."Nematodes may play a significant but unacknowledged role in the global nutrient cycling of carbon, nitrogen, methane and sulfur," Bik said.The title of the paper is "Nematode-associated Microbial Taxa Do Not Correlate With Host Phylogeny, Geographic Region or Feeding Morphology in Marine Sediment Habitats." Taruna Schuelke, a bioinformatics specialist, and Tiago Pereira, a postdoctoral researcher, both in Bik's lab, were joint first authors. Sarah Hardy from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, also contributed to this research.
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April 3, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/04/180403115955.htm
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Dispatch from the field II: Students describe an elusive spider while stationed in Borneo
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A mystery has long shrouded the orb-weaving spider genus
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Such is the case for Nevertheless, students taking part in a recent two-week tropical ecology field course organized by the Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University, and hosted by the Danau Girang Field Centre (DGFC) on the island of Borneo, Malaysia, found a mature male spider hanging on the web of a red and blue female, later identified as At the brink of a long-awaited discovery and eager to describe the male, the students along with their lecturers and the field station scientific staff encountered a peril -- with problematic species like the studied orb weaver they were in need for strong evidence to prove that it matched the female from the web. Furthermore, molecular DNA-based analysis was not an option at the time, since the necessary equipment was not available at DGFC.On the other hand, being at the center of the action turned out to have advantages no less persuasive than DNA evidence. Having conducted thorough field surveys in the area, the team has concluded that the male's observation on that particular female's web in addition to the fact that no other Adapting to the quite basic conditions at the DGFC laboratory, the students and their mentors put in use various items they had on hand, including smartphones paired up with headlights mounted on gooseneck clips in place of sophisticated cameras.In the end, they gathered all the necessary data to prepare the formal description of the newly identified male.Once they had the observations and the data, there was only one question left to answer. How could they proceed with the submission of a manuscript to a scholarly journal, so that their finding is formally announced and recognised?Thanks to the elaborated and highly automated workflow available at the peer-reviewed open access This is the second publication in the series "Dispatch from the field," resulting from an initiative led by spider taxonomist Dr Jeremy Miller. In 2014, another team of students and their mentors described a new species of curious one-millimetre-long spider from the Danau Girang Field Center. Both papers serve to showcase the feasibility of publication and sharing of easy to find, access and re-use biodiversity data."This has been a unique educational experience for the students," says Jeremy. "They got to experience how tropical field biologists work, which is often from remote locations and without sophisticated equipment. This means that creativity and persistence are necessary to solve problems and complete a research objective. The fact that the students got to participate in advancing knowledge about this remarkable spider species by contributing to a manuscript was really exciting."
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March 29, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180329095411.htm
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One species described multiple times: How taxonomists contribute to biodiversity discovery
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While working on a rare little known group of Oriental wasps that most likely parasitise the eggs of grasshoppers, locusts or crickets, not only did a team of four entomologists discover four previously unknown species, but they also found that another four species within the same genus (
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Their study, published in the open access journal The research was conducted by doctorate candidate Huayan Chen and Dr. Norman F. Johnson, both affiliated with The Ohio State University, USA, Dr. Elijah J. Talamas, Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, USA, and Dr. Lubomír Masner, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.Prior to their study, there were only nine species known in the genus that had been described over the last 113 years from India, Japan and the Philippines.However, following careful analyses, most of those species turned out to be synonyms of another one discovered in distant 1905, In their turn, having identified four new species belonging to the same genus after studying additional material collected from Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, and the Fijian archipelago, the scientists have maintained the species number in the group intact.Additionally, the team provides a detailed illustrated identification key to all members of the genus in their paper. This list of characteristic features is set to prevent similar taxonomic confusion in the future.In conclusion, Chen and colleagues have significantly advanced our understanding of the diversity and biogeography of the rare parasitoids, amongst which there might be some that will eventually prove to be helpful in pest management."Taxonomic revisions are essential for the fundamental understanding of biodiversity and its conservation. Taxonomists play a critical role in this process," explains the lead author.
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March 29, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180329095424.htm
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Fossils highlight Canada-Russia connection 53 million years ago
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A new 53 million-year-old insect fossil called a scorpionfly discovered at B.C.'s McAbee fossil bed site bears a striking resemblance to fossils of the same age from Pacific-coastal Russia, giving further evidence of an ancient Canada-Russia connection.
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"We've seen this connection before through fossil plants and animals, but these insects show this in a beautiful way," says Bruce Archibald, a research associate in SFU's Department of Biological Sciences and the Royal BC Museum. "They are so much alike that only the wing colour of the new McAbee species tells them apart." Archibald and Alexandr Rasnitsyn, of Moscow's Russian Academy of Sciences, described the find and its significance in this month's The Canadian Entomologist."I'm not aware of any case where two such species so much alike and so close in age have been found in both Pacific Russia and Pacific Canada, and that's pretty great," said Archibald. He notes that the insect's only living relative is found in the temperate forest of central Chile, which has a climate that is similar in ways to B.C.'s 53 million years ago.The new Canadian species was named
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March 26, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180326110138.htm
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Crystallography used to analyze fossils and assign them to microscopic organisms
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Blue-green algae are one of the oldest organisms in the world and have an important role to play in many ecosystems on Earth. However, it has always been difficult to identify fossils as blue-green algae without any trace of doubt. The reason is their unremarkable sheath made of calcium carbonate. A Master's student at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) has now developed a method which can help assign organisms to a particular species.
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Most organisms which once lived on Earth have become extinct. Not only individual species, but entire families and broader groups of species have disappeared forever, often leaving only very sparse information about their life and their biology. Researchers often find puzzling fossils they cannot allocate to any known group, especially dating from the period when many groups of organisms first evolved. Such microscopic organisms are often classed as blue-green algae, as on the surface they resemble the microscopic calcium carbonate sheaths of the algae. Blue-green algae are one of the oldest organisms on Earth and play a fundamental role in many marine and terrestrial ecosystems, for example by performing intensive photosynthesis or as food for a number of animals. In spite of their significance, little is known about their evolution, as their fossils are virtually shapeless tubes or bubbles of carbonate. It has therefore proved very difficult for researchers to determine whether fossils belong to blue-green algae or a completely different group of organisms.Working together with a team of researchers from FAU, Jan-Filip Päßler, a Master's student in Palaeobiology at FAU, has examined the crystallography of fossil structures using methods derived from materials science. Päßler compared carbonate fossils, so-called trilobites, with two microfossils which had not yet been able to be assigned, but which were extremely common in the oceans approximately 400 million years ago. He based his comparison on the observation that biologically formed carbonate structures have a very specific pattern. What is more, organisms form their skeletons in different ways -- and these differences become apparent in the way crystals are arranged in the carbonate. Researchers were not only able to measure the direction in which crystals grew, but also misorientations between adjacent crystals. They found that in blue-green algae the crystals follow a less structured pattern with many misorientations. Trilobites, however, have an ordered structure with fewer misorientations. According to Päßler's supervisor, Dr. Emilia Jarochowska, 'our approach can be used in future to clarify the biological relationships between many other mysterious fossils in geological history'.
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March 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321141429.htm
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US national parks increasingly important for bird conservation in face of climate change
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U.S. National Parks could become even more important for the conservation of bird species in the face of climate change, according to a study published March 21, 2018 in the open-access journal
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The U.S. National Parks offer strong protection for birds from many invasive and ecological threats, but little is known about the impact of climate change on bird populations living in the national parks.Wu and colleagues related species distribution models from the North American Breeding Bird Survey (summer) and Audubon Christmas Bird Count (winter) observations to climate data from the early 2000s and projected to 2041-2070. The researchers analyzed climate suitability projections over time for 513 species across 274 national parks, under a high and low greenhouse gas emission scenario. They then classified climate suitability for birds as improving, worsening, stable, potential colonization, and potential extirpation.The researchers found that potential colonization of species in U.S. National Parks exceeds potential extirpation in more than 60% of parks, and if projected extirpations and colonizations were realized, the average park would have 29% more species in winter and 6% more species in summer. The authors suggest that their findings reinforce the importance of the U.S. National Parks to the conservation of birds in the face of climate change and the value of monitoring species distribution to better inform conservation and management strategies."Over the next few decades, the majority of birds currently found across the National Park System are expected to experience changes in climate conditions, which on average may lead to turnover of nearly a quarter of the bird community per park," says Gregor Schuurman, co-author on the study. "Despite these changes, parks will become increasingly important as refuges for birds in the future."
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March 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321141423.htm
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Predators learn to identify prey from other species
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Wolves purportedly raised Romulus and Remus, who went on to rule Rome. Is there good scientific evidence for learning across species? Researchers at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama wanted to know if predatory bats learn both from other members of their own species and from other predatory bat species.
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"We wanted to know if bats learn to recognize new foods from members of another bat species as quickly as they learn from their own species," said first author Krista Patriquin, a postdoctoral fellow with STRI Staff Scientist, Rachel Page, at the time of the study. "It turns out they do.""This tells us how bats may cope with changes in food availability resulting from environmental changes and helps to explain how bats have become such successful and widespread mammals," said Patriquin, now a postdoc at the University of Toronto.The research team first tested fringed-lipped bats, Then they asked whether the same bats could learn to recognize the tone from another species in their neighborhood, the white-throated, round-eared bat, "We previously taught the fringed-lipped bats to identify a frog call with the same food reward," said Rachel Page. "It took them longer to recognize this artificially generated sound as a signal for food, presumably because it was not a sound that was familiar to them.""We also thought it was fascinating that despite their ability to learn from one another, the bats preferred to hang near members of their own species in the flight cage. In the wild, we have never seen them in the same roost, although they may roost very close to roosts of the other species, so they seem to recognize and identify with their own species."The bats could also learn to recognize a new food source by trial and error, without help from other bats. However, it took them much longer. Social learning saves time and energy otherwise spent on trial and error learning and reduces the possibility of making costly mistakes. Some of the 1300-plus bat species in the world live for up to 40 years, so the ability to learn not only from their own species, but from other species in their communities may make a huge difference in terms of their survival."These are highly intelligent bats!" said Jenna Kohles, a STRI intern when the study was done, and now back at STRI as a Masters' student at the University of Konstanz. "We've gained exciting insights into how not just one species may adapt to environmental changes and new food resources, but how whole communities of animals occupying similar ecological niches may adapt together as information and innovation spreads from one species to another."
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March 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321121553.htm
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The environment determines Caribbean hummingbirds' vulnerability
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Hummingbirds' specialization and vulnerability are often predicted based on their physical traits. Scientists now found that this is not the case for hummingbirds on the Caribbean islands. Instead, the bird's environment is the determining factor. The new study was led by scientists from Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, University of Copenhagen, and published today in the scientific journal
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Hummingbird's body size and bill length are often used to predict how specialized and vulnerable the birds are to extinction of the flowers they feed on. However, a new study shows that vulnerability and specialisation of Caribbean hummingbirds are determined by their environment. The study is published in "Our study shows that Caribbean hummingbirds living in rainy mountainous landscapes with cooler temperatures are more specialized and vulnerable to extinction of the flowers they drink nectar from, compared to hummingbirds in the lowlands."Bo Dalsgaard elaborates on the findings, ." .. we believe our results display a general trend that applies to many other animals and plants throughout the world. Thus, protecting nature in mountain regions is very important, if we want to conserve specialized and vulnerable species, which exist in just one or a few places on earth."There are around 340 hummingbird species in the world, all native to the Americas. Of those, fourteen live on the Caribbean islands and only the Rufous-breasted Hermit (Glaucis hirsutus) is also found on the American mainland.In general, birds on islands are more vulnerable to extinction -- during the past 400 years 90% of known bird extinctions have happened on islands.Hummingbirds on the Caribbean islands most likely developed their characteristic body sizes and bill lengths before they came to inhabit the islands from the American mainland 5-9 million years ago. Postdoc Jonathan Kennedy from Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate, explains,"We found that Caribbean hummingbirds have likely evolved their physical traits before colonising the Caribbean, and not in co-existence with their flowers, which is the common trend often assumed on the American mainland. How these relationships develop over long timescales are important in order to better understand how vulnerable the birds are if the flowers they feed on become extinct."Many species rely upon interactions with others in a mutual way, such as hummingbirds who drink nectar from flowers, while at the same time pollinating the flowers they visits. Thus, this study provides important knowledge on the predictability of extinction risk through the study of networks of interactions among groups of species."Our results can help predict the extinction risk of species, which are mutually dependent on each other, like hummingbirds and their flowers. This has become especially important as climate change and human activity disrupt these delicate partnerships, and cause extinctions of not just birds and plants, but many other species throughout the world," Associate Professor Bo Dalsgaard concludes.
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March 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180321094754.htm
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Hunting squid slowed by rising carbon levels
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Scientists have found that high carbon dioxide levels cause squid to bungle attacks on their prey.
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PhD candidate Blake Spady from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (Coral CoE) at James Cook University (JCU) led the investigation. He said that the oceans absorb more than one-quarter of all the excess carbon dioxide (CO"Climate models project that unless there is a serious commitment to reducing emissions, COMr Spady said the team chose to study cephalopods (a group that includes squid, cuttlefish and octopuses) because while most previous behavioural studies have focused on fishes, the effects of elevated CO"Cephalopods also prey on just about anything they can wrap their arms around and are themselves preyed upon by a wide range of predator species, so they occupy an important place within marine food webs."The scientists tested the effects of elevated CO"For pygmy squid, there was a 20% decrease in the proportion of squid that attacked their prey after exposure to elevated COBigfin reef squid showed no difference in the proportion of individuals that attacked prey, but, like the pygmy squid, they were slower to attack and used different body patterns more often."Mr Spady said both species showed increased activity at elevated CO"Overall, we found similar behavioural effects of elevated v on two separate cephalopod orders that occupy largely distinct niches. This means a variety of cephalopods may be adversely affected by rising CO"However, because squid have short lifespans, large populations, and a high rate of population increase, they may have the potential to adapt to rapid changes in the physical environment," Mr Spady added."The fast lifestyle of squid could mean they are more likely to adapt to future ocean conditions than some other marine species, and this is the next question we intend to investigate."
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March 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180319120523.htm
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Molecular cuisine for gut bacteria
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Scientific recipes to successfully grow and study gut bacteria in the lab: that's what EMBL* scientists are publishing in
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The bacteria living in the gut have a big impact on our health. But researchers still don't know what kind of food most of our gut bacteria like to live on, or precisely how they metabolise nutrients. The current paper reports on the growth characteristics of the main human gut bacteria in nineteen different growth media with well-defined recipes. Peer Bork, Kiran Patil and Nassos Typas, all group leaders at EMBL Heidelberg, led the work."Our resource provides scientists with tools to experimentally investigate the gut microbiome ecology, going beyond correlations and identifying causes and effects," says Nassos Typas.Surprise!The research team selected 96 strains from 72 bacterial species, representing the most frequently occurring and most abundant species in the human gut plus important species linked to infectious or other types of gut diseases, like colorectal cancer and inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). While characterising their nutritional preferences and ability to produce various molecules, the researchers discovered unknown metabolic features of some bacteria."We were surprised to find new bacteria with the capability to utilize mucin, the protein that makes up mucus," says Kiran Patil. "These bacteria can contribute to inflammation and infection by weakening the protective mucus barrier lining the gut. Another surprise came from bacteria that proved to be inhibited by amino acids and short-chain fatty acids, common ingredients in most growth media. It turns out that rich media with many nutrients can be toxic for these species, whereas we used to think: the more food, the better."Furthermore, even closely related bacteria sometimes had completely different nutritional preferences. This shows that microbiologists can't base their assumptions about metabolic capabilities on bacteria's genetic relationships alone.The new scientific 'cookbook' is filled with molecular recipes on how to grow gut bacteria, providing the community with the tools for studying the structure and function of the human gut microbiome.
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New Species
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March 15, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180315155449.htm
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Ending overfishing would stop the population declines of endangered bycatch species about half the time
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Healthier fish stocks. Higher catches. Profits from fishing. Is there a way to achieve these holy grails of commercial fisheries without harming endangered species that are caught incidentally?
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A new UC Santa Barbara-led study has found that may indeed be possible about half the time. According to the research group's analysis, ending overfishing would also promote population recoveries for many endangered species ensnared accidentally as bycatch -- the unwanted fish and other marine creatures caught during commercial fishing for a different species. The team's findings appear in the journal "Many large animals, including marine mammals, turtles and birds, are threatened by bycatch," said lead author Matt Burgess, a postdoctoral scholar in the Sustainable Fisheries Group at UCSB's Bren School of Environmental Science & Management. "We tend to think that we can only save these species by either dramatically improving our gear or by constraining our fisheries. But this project demonstrated that wasn't always the case. In about half the cases, overexploiting these mammals, turtles and birds occurs because we're also overexploiting the target species."The study examined how much fishing pressure needs to be reduced to maximize profits in the 4,713 fisheries that produce most of the world's catch -- and to halt the population declines of 20 marine mammal, sea turtle and sea bird populations threatened as bycatch. The researchers also identified which fisheries might be causing the bycatch for each population.To account for the many uncertainties in each of these aspects, the scientists simulated 1,000 possible scenarios. In each, they asked what fraction of the 20 threatened bycatch populations would begin to recover if all fisheries adopted efforts that would maximize their profits. For each bycatch population that would not recover under such efforts, the investigators then asked how much profit the fisheries would have to give up to enable recovery of the bycatch population. In 95 percent of the simulated scenarios, the analysis demonstrated that between seven and 13 of the bycatch populations could be saved from decline at a cost of less than 5 percent of the maximum profit."Maintaining productive fisheries and protecting threatened bycatch species are two of the primary goals of fisheries policy," Burgess said. "We found that about half the time we can accomplish these goals together with the same management actions."For some populations like the eastern Pacific leatherback turtle, that bycatch is unsustainable but so, too, is the fishing pressure on many of the target species. "For many species, you actually get a 'win-win,' where building higher stocks of fish in the ocean leads to higher fishery profits and recovery of endangered species," said co-author Christopher Costello, a Bren professor and co-principal investigator of the Sustainable Fisheries Group.To save the other half of the bycatch populations, fisheries would either have to reduce fishing so much that they would give up a lot of their profits or substantially improve their fishing technologies to better avoid bycatch. "These bycatch populations either need total or near-total elimination of bycatch to survive, like the vaquita porpoise from the Gulf of California," Burgess explained. "Or they are caught in fisheries that already exploit their target species relatively sustainably, as may be the case for the New Zealand sea lion.""Recognizing the benefits of rebuilding fisheries to endangered populations allows us to also focus attention on other key sources of endangered species mortality, like egg poaching, invasive species, pollution and habitat loss," said co-author Rebecca Lewison of San Diego State University.All of the data and computer code from the study is publicly available online. "We did this so that our analysis will be fully transparent and reproducible by others," said co-lead author Grant McDermott of the University of Oregon. "This is gradually becoming the norm in science, which is great."
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New Species
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March 14, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180314145032.htm
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Tradeoffs between weaponry and fecundity in snapping shrimp queens vary with eusociality
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Amongst species of colonial snapping shrimp, the capacity for defense versus reproduction in queens varies with the level of cooperation, according to a study published March 14, 2018 in the open-access journal
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Snapping shrimp in the genus In queens of snapping shrimp species that are weakly eusocial, the researchers found strong trade-offs between fighting claw mass and egg number. In contrast, this trade-off was smaller or absent in queens of species that are strongly eusocial. In addition, colony size was also a factor: in large colonies of highly eusocial species, trade-offs between queens' weaponry and fecundity were smaller. This work suggests that in snapping shrimp species that are less cooperative, female-female conflict within the colony has selected for queens that retain weapons at a significant cost to fecundity. Conversely, in species that are more eusocial -- notably those with a single queen per colony -- protection by other colony members could be an explanation to a reduction in this cost of weaponry in queens."We find that in eusocial
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New Species
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March 14, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180314092348.htm
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Scientists remind their peers: Female birds sing, too
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When North American ornithologists hear a bird singing, they're likely to assume it's a male. But in many species, the females sing too -- and a new commentary in
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Authors Karan Odom of Cornell University and Lauryn Benedict of the University of Northern Colorado both discovered the world of female birdsong through their own research. "I started studying California towhees 17 years ago, and I was fascinated by the duet vocalization given by females and males," says Benedict. "That led me to start looking for female song in other North American bird species, and I was surprised to learn that it was much more common than I expected. The reports of female song are buried in odd corners of the literature, but when you put them all together, you start to see some interesting patterns."Though singing females were likely the norm among the ancestors of today's songbirds, female song today is understudied and is underrepresented in collections of bird sound recordings. This, say Odom and Benedict, may be result of bias toward the world's temperate regions -- though more widespread in temperate species than many ornithologists appreciate, female song is most common among tropical birds. They argue that better documentation of which species female song is present in and more detailed descriptions of female song structure and output could improve our understanding of birds' comparative physiology, neurobiology, behavioral ecology, evolution, and even conservation. Birds of conservation concern are often located and identified by song during surveys, and assumptions that all singing birds are male could mislead wildlife managers about the state of populations.Odom and Benedict urge their fellow ornithologists to spread the word that female birds sing, to share resources, and to disseminate their findings. You don't need to be a professional ornithologist in order to help expand our knowledge of female song, either -- Odom has created a website where any birdwatcher can upload their observations. "If you hear a bird singing, do not assume it's a male," she says. "If you observe a female bird singing, document it by uploading field notes, audio, or video to the collections on our website, "Odom and Benedict have written an excellent appeal to document and record more female bird song," adds Leiden University's Katharina Riebel, a former collaborator of Odom's. "They rightly point out that the extent of female bird song has been starkly underestimated, as almost by default we assume that a singing bird must be the male of the species. As a consequence, we might have missed out many aspects and the dynamics of male and female vocal signaling in songbirds -- clearly, there is still lots to discover! I am confident that ornithologists in the field can make substantial contributions toward these questions by sharing their observations and recordings, as I very much hope this article will encourage them to do."
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New Species
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March 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312085100.htm
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Life in the fast flow: Tadpoles of new species rely on 'suction cups' to keep up
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Indonesia, a megadiverse country spanning over 17,000 islands located between Australia and mainland Asia, is home to more than 16% of the world's known amphibian and reptile species, with almost half of the amphibians found nowhere else in the world. Unsurprisingly, biodiversity scientists have been feverishly discovering and describing fascinating new animals from the exotic island in recent years.
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Such is the case of an international team from the University of Hamburg, Germany, University of Texas at Arlington, USA, University of Bern, Switzerland and Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia, who came across a curious tadpole while collecting amphibian larvae from fast-flowing streams as part of an arduous expedition in the remote forests on the island of Sumatra.To the amazement of the scientists, it turned out that the tadpoles possess a peculiar cup-like structure on their bellies, in addition to the regular oral disk found in typical tadpoles. As a result, the team described two new species and a genus in the open access journal "This phenomenon where tadpoles display 'belly suckers' is known as gastromyzophory and, albeit not unheard of, is a rare adaptation that is only found in certain toads in the Americas and frogs in Asia," explains lead author Umilaela Arifin.The abdominal sucker, it is hypothesized, helps these tadpoles to exploit a very special niche -- fast-flowing streams -- where the water would otherwise be too turbulent and rapid to hang around. Gastromyzophorous species, however, rely on the suction provided by their modified bellies to secure an exclusive access to plentiful food, such as algae, while the less adapted are simply washed away.When the scientists took a closer look at the peculiar tadpoles and their adult forms, using a powerful combination of molecular and morphological data, they realized that they had not only stumbled upon a rare amphibian trait, but had also discovered two brand new species of frogs in the process.Moreover, the animals turned out so distinct in their evolutionary makeup, compared to all other frogs, that the scientists had to create a whole new genus to accommodate them. Formally named Sumaterana, the genus is to be commonly referred to as Sumatran Cascade Frogs."We decided to call the new genus Sumaterana after Sumatra, to reflect the fact that these new species, with their rare evolutionary adaptation are endemic to Sumatra's rainforests and, in a sense, are emblematic of the exceptional diversity of animals and plants on the island," says co-author Dr. Utpal Smart. "Tragically, all of them are in peril today, given the current rate of deforestation."The authors agree that much more taxonomic work is still needed to determine and describe Sumatra's herpetofaunal diversity, some of which they fear, could be irreversibly lost well before biologists have the chance to discover it.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
March 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180312085117.htm
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Citizen science birding data passes scientific muster
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As long as there have been birdwatchers, there have been lists. Birders keep detailed records of the species they've seen and compare these lists with each other as evidence of their accomplishments. Now those lists, submitted and aggregated to birding site eBird, can help scientists track bird populations and identify conservation issues before it's too late.
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Joshua Horns is an eBird user himself and a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah. In a paper published today in Many nations don't conduct official bird surveys, Horns says. "In a lot of tropical nations that's especially worrisome because that's where most birds live." But he's now shown that eBird data may be able to fill that gap.For birders, eBird is a way to add their observations to a worldwide community and to contribute data to a vast and growing database of which birds have been seen where, and when.Birders at the University of Utah (notably Kenny Frisch, an assistant horticulturalist who has logged 116 of the 120 known species on campus: see sidebar below) have made the university a local hotspot. And eBird has a system in place to ensure that the data submitted reflects reality. Fact-checkers, including Frisch, are contacted by eBird to follow up on unusual sightings. Ornithologist Çagan Sekercioglu (currently the fifth-ranked eBirder in the world with 7,273 species observed) says he has been flagged for fact-checking when he identifies species never before seen in an area, and uses his photographs to verify his sightings.Horns' question was whether eBird data could serve as a reliable measure of bird populations. In the United States, he had the luxury of being able to compare birders' lists to the Breeding Bird Survey, conducted annually by the U.S. Geological Survey throughout the United States and Canada. But in South America, the Caribbean and tropical Africa, along with other bird hotspots, government data is absent. eBird users, however, are present all around the world.Horns compared more than 11 million eBird lists to government data between 1997 and 2016. To account for the range in birder skill represented in the eBird lists, Horns used the length of the birders' lists as a proxy for their expertise and experience. "Some studies have shown that as you bird for a longer stretch of time you do record more species, but as you bird for more and more years, the number of species you see on any outing increases as well," Horns says.With additional statistical controls to ensure a good comparison between the eBird and official data, Horns set out to see how many lists were required to accurately track a species' population. The cutoff, he found, was just about 10,000 lists. So, if you have above that number of lists for a country or region, the results suggest, you can be confident that population species trends observed in the lists are a reflection of reality.But what about areas that don't have that many lists? Horns says that lists from bird atlases and ecotourism groups can also be used, again with list length as a proxy for birder skill. Sekercioglu is doing his part, having submitted eBird lists following recent trips to Bolivia, New Guinea and Madagascar.The eBird data is more accurate for common birds, Horns says, simply because they're observed so often. "White-crowned pigeons live only in the Florida Keys," Horns says, "so unless you live in the Florida Keys, you're not going to be seeing them." Also, more lists are submitted for areas closer to cities. "You're not going to have many people out in Utah's West Desert looking for birds but there will be a lot in Farmington Bay, near the Great Salt Lake," Horns says.But even common birds can be vulnerable. Horns' analysis of eBird data shows significant declines for 48 percent of 574 North American bird species over the past 20 years. Large numbers of a common bird species could be lost before the general public notices, Horns says. "It's those declines in common species that could really drive down functioning of an ecosystem versus declines in rarer species."Horns' results show the value of citizen science observations by amateurs, although the practice of birdwatching long predates the term "citizen science." Each time birders head out, tripods and binoculars in hand, they are serving as another set of scientific eyes to help bird conservation efforts."We hope this analysis can be taken a step further," Horns says, "We can use it to start monitoring these birds and pick up on birds that may be declining before they decline so much that it's hard to bring them back."
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New Species
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March 8, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180308120607.htm
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Hawaiian stick spiders re-evolve the same three guises every time they island hop
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We don't usually expect evolution to be predictable. But Hawaiian stick spiders of the Ariamnes genus have repeatedly evolved the same distinctive forms, known as ecomorphs, on different islands, researchers report on March 8 in the journal
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The stick spiders live in the forests of the Hawaiian archipelago, over 2,000 feet above sea level, on the islands of Kauai, Oahu, Molokai, Maui, and Hawaii. Although they're nocturnal arthropods that can't see well, they're still brightly and distinctly colored. "You've got this dark one that lives in rocks or in bark, a shiny and reflective gold one that lives under leaves, and this one that's a matte white, completely white, that lives on lichen," explains Rosemary Gillespie, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley.These different colorings allow the spiders to camouflage themselves against specific similarly colored surfaces in their respective habitats and avoid their major predator, birds called Hawaiian honeycreepers. But what's remarkable is that as the spiders have moved from one island to the next during their evolutionary history, these same forms have evolved over and over again. This process produces new species that are more closely related to spiders of different forms on the same island than they are to lookalikes from other islands.And it happens fast -- at least in evolutionary time. A dark spider that hops from an old island to a new one can diversify into new species of dark, gold, and white spiders before gold and white spiders from the old island have time to reach the new one. "They arrive on an island, and boom! You get independent evolution to the same set of forms," Gillespie says.It's also important that these forms are the same each time. "They don't evolve to be orange or striped. There isn't any additional diversification," she says. This, she believes, suggests that the Ariamnes spiders have some sort of preprogrammed switch in their DNA that can be quickly turned on to allow them to evolve rapidly into these successful forms. But how that process might work is still unclear.It hasn't really been studied, because ecomorphs aren't common. "Most radiations just don't do this," she says. Typical adaptive radiation, like with Darwin's finches, usually produces a wide diversity of forms. And convergent evolution, where two different species independently evolve the same strategy for fulfilling a certain niche, doesn't usually happen repeatedly. There are just a few good examples of this kind of fixed pattern of repeated evolution: the Ariamnes spiders, the Hawaiian branch of the Tetragnatha genus of long-jawed spiders, and the Anolis lizards of the Caribbean."Now we're thinking about why it's only in these kinds of organisms that you get this sort of rapid and repeated evolution," Gillespie says. While it's a question she's still working on, the three lineages do all live in remote locations, have few predators, and rely on their coloring to camouflage them in a very particular habitat. They are also all free living in the vegetation: neither of the two spider groups builds a web, which means that they, like the lizards, are free to move about and find the kind of habitat they require for camouflage. She hopes that examining what these groups have in common will "provide insight into what elements of evolution are predictable, and under which circumstances we expect evolution to be predictable and under which we do not."She also hopes that this research will help the world to understand how much Hawaii's vulnerable forests still have to offer. "Often, I hear people saying, 'Oh, Hawaii's so well studied. What else is there to look at?' But there are all these unknown radiations that are just sitting there, all these weird and wonderful organisms. We need everyone to understand what's there and how extraordinary it is. And then we need to see what we can do to protect and conserve what still waits to be described."
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New Species
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March 8, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180308143148.htm
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New butterfly species named: Wahydra graslieae
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As the Field Museum's chief curiosity correspondent, Emily Graslie has plunged elbow-deep into wolf guts, dug up 52-million-year-old fish fossils and unpacked species classification using candy as stand-ins.
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Graslie gives the public behind-the-scenes access to natural history collections via her educational YouTube channel "The Brain Scoop" (In recognition of her outreach efforts, scientists have named a new species of butterfly in her honor: "We thought that after spending years explaining why specimens are important and bringing natural history collections to the attention of the public, Emily was definitely someone who should have a bug named after her," said Andy Warren, senior collections manager of the Florida Museum of Natural History's McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity. "She was really overdue for this kind of recognition."The butterfly, about the size of a postage stamp, was stowed away in a Tupperware box of specimens waiting for identification until 2016 when Warren and visiting colleagues Eduardo Carneiro and Diego Dolibaina from the Federal University of Paraná in Brazil decided to tackle the backlog."We were an assembly line," Warren recalled. "I was photographing the specimens, and they were dissecting and illustrating the genitalia," one of the best means of narrowing butterflies to genus or species.To the untrained eye, "We knew it was a new species, but we just had no idea even what genus it was. Nothing else looks like it," he said. "Once Eduardo made the call that it was a Wahydra, it clicked. It was really a group discovery."Little is known about the genus Wahydra, a group of small Andean skippers found from Venezuela to Argentina with most species in Ecuador. Wahydra are rare in collections, primarily because they're tough to find in the wild, living at high elevations where poor weather conditions predominate, Warren said.In this obscure genus, "In the last few years, five new species of Wahydra have been described, but scientists have likely just started to scratch the surface of the genus's diversity, he said.Warren said of the 15 identified Wahydra species, scientists only know the host plant for a few, and all eat bamboo. He said that every 1,500-foot increase in elevation in the Andes results in a complete turnover in bamboo species and the butterflies that feed on them."That would explain the rarity of Wahydra and the patchiness of their distribution," he said.But fieldwork is not the only way to find new species. Museum collections themselves are also good places to look."I guarantee that the compactors in the McGuire Center are full of undescribed species," he said. "That's part of the value of museums. Without these collections, there's no way to document biodiversity on Earth. It's hard to know where to put conservation resources unless you know what's really out there."Graslie said she will eagerly be following the research efforts on "Someone might look at "This is
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New Species
| 2,018 |
March 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180307130051.htm
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Two new species of stone centipedes found hiding in larch forests in China
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Scientists described two species of previously unknown stone centipedes from China. Now housed at the Hengshui University, China, where all members of the team work, the studied specimens were all collected in the leaf litter or under rocks in larch forests.
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Having conducted their research across China, researchers Dr Sujian Pei, Yanmin Lu, Haipeng Liu, Dr Xiaojie Hou and Dr Huiqin Ma announced the two new species -- Stone centipedes are the species which belong to the order Lithobiomorpha. These centipedes are anamorphic, meaning that they grow additional pair of legs as they moult and develop additional body segments. By the time they are fully grown, these count 15 in total. Unlike earlier predecessors, stone centipedes do not have the compound eyes we know from insects. Instead, stone centipedes see through simple eyes, sometimes a group of simple eyes, or, if living exclusively underground, they might have no eyes at all.One of the newly discovered species, The second previously unknown centipede, In both papers, the authors point out that while the myriapod fauna of China remains generally poorly known, even less attention has been given to the order of stone centipedes.The research articles are included in the special issue "Proceedings of the 17th International Congress of Myriapodology, Krabi, Thailand." The congress, organised by Prof. Somsak Panha, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, was held in July 2017.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
March 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180307122000.htm
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New insights into biodiversity hotspots could help protect them from potential deep-sea mining
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New insights into animal patterns around extinct submarine volcanoes could inform measures used to protect marine ecosystems from human activities, such as trawling and deep-sea mining. These insights have been published today in
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Lissette Victorero, the PhD- student who led this research, from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) and the University of Southampton, said "The approaches used in the study have previously mainly been used to investigate ecosystems on land. However, I found them especially useful for prioritising areas worth protecting by pinpointing unique animal communities on the seamount. This can be a powerful tool for conservation and management. For example, monitoring the impacts of trawling and future mining on deep-sea biodiversity."Extinct deep-sea volcanoes, or seamounts, are biodiversity hotspots, hosting substantial coral and sponge communities and abundant fish stocks. The study used video footage from a robotic remotely operated vehicle (ROV) up to 3 km deep, collected during a research expedition. From the video, Lissette and her fellow researchers from the NOC and the Universities of Bristol, Essex and Newfoundland identified over 30 000 animals living on the surface of the Annan Seamount in the Equatorial-Atlantic, including spectacular cold-water coral colonies.By applying statistical models, the scientists were able to tease apart how changes in the biological communities are structured and what drives these patterns. They found that the structure was controlled by small-scale changes on the sea floor and that the key difference between the marine life communities was the identity of species, rather than the number of species. This finding suggests that any human activities that alter the seafloor, such as potential deep-sea mining, could have a big impact on communities of marine life around the seamount. "I am especially excited about our results, since seamounts are really poorly studied, and now we can investigate whether these patterns hold in other seamounts and regions and continue forming links between local and regional deep-sea biodiversity patterns," Lissette continued.On this seamount researchers found that animals clustered in certain areas, either as a cluster of one species, or as dense groups of different species. In one area the team found hundreds of sea urchins coming together to mate, which has rarely been observed. An area of deep-sea near the seamount was also found to be full of soft corals. These findings can be used to prevent human activities from disrupting or destroying these communities of important marine species.This research is part of the ERC funded CACH project (Starting Grant no 278705), and forms part of the NOC's on-going research into deep-sea ecosystems, as well as investigating the potential impacts of marine resource exploration.Footage of the soft corals can be found by following this link
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New Species
| 2,018 |
March 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180307100634.htm
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Why rare plants are rare
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Rare plant species suffer more from disease than commoner species. The fact that rare species are more susceptible to attack by micro-organisms living in the soil, such as fungi and bacteria, may in fact be one of the reasons they are rare. Biologists have been trying to work out why some species are rare, while others are common, since Darwin's time and a new study from researchers at the University of Bern provides a possible answer.
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It has long been assumed that species are common because they can cope with a wide range of environmental conditions. Common species would therefore have a wide tolerance for different climates or soils and would be able to grow in many places, while rare species would only be able to grow under special conditions and in a few places. However, the way in which plants interact with other organisms, such as those in the soil, could also explain rarity, although few researchers have looked at this.Scientists at the University of Bern have now shown that rare species, which occur in just a few places, are much more strongly harmed by soil organisms than common species. The study was published in the journal Plants use their roots to take up the nutrients they need to grow and at the same time they produce a number of "exudates" which they excrete into the soil. These are organic (carbon containing) compounds that in turn provide food for many different microbes. As different microbes prefer different exudates, plant species end up with different communities of soil organisms living around their roots. Some of these organisms (such as mycorrhizae) help the plants, but others (like pathogens) harm them.To test if rare and common species differed in the soil communities they cultured, or in how they responded to them, the researchers did an experiment in a greenhouse comparing plants that are rare or common in Switzerland. They showed that rare plants suffered more than twice as much from soil organisms and, compared to common species, they also seemed to accumulate more pathogens around their roots. "Just as with people, some plants are more resistant to disease than others," explains Anne Kempel, the first author of the study. It seems that being better able to cope with generalist pathogens allows common species to spread and colonise new habitats more easily. "A high susceptibility to pathogens prevents this and seems to make some species rare," says Kempel.This may cause more problems for rare species in the future. "This is especially bad news given the current changes in climate," says Eric Allan, the senior author of the study. "Because of their susceptibility to disease, rare species might find it harder to find suitable new habitats as the climate changes."
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New Species
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March 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180307100630.htm
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Ant raids: It’s all in the genes
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Certain ants attack and enslave other species, and integrate their offspring into their own colonies in order to survive. Researchers at the Senckenberg Nature Research Society and the Johannes-Gutenberg University Mainz have recently discovered that the raids required to achieve this are controlled by different genes in each of several closely related ant species of the genus Temnothorax. This indicates that the evolution of closely related species through changes in the genetic material is a random process in which several paths may lead to the same outcome. Moreover, the researchers were able to identify two specific attack genes in slavemaker ants. The study was recently published in the Nature Group's journal
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Barely 3mm long and yet a veritable war machine -- the North American ant species "Our experiments show that the combat strategies of This, together with other findings, suggests, that in the slave-raiding ants differences in gene expressions, i.e., the reading of the gene sequence and the transcription into proteins, is solely geared toward the raid. Similar patterns were also discovered in the potential slaves, which showed different, genetically based defense patterns.Figuratively speaking, different gene expression means that that in the genetic material of the three ant species, certain buttons are pressed at different levels of intensity -- yet, ultimately, this leads to the same result in all species: a successful raid. The team was surprised by these findings, since for closely related, genetically similar species it was assumed that they would all follow similar genetic paths to achieve a specific goal.However, this study now shows that genetic evolution among closely related species may well be the result of random selection. "The results suggest that many evolutionary adaptations can be traced back to random mutations. These mutations lead to genetic differences even between closely related species. However, since these species are often subject to similar selective pressure, the result of the adaptive processes, i.e., the behavior, is similar," explains Professor Susanne Foitzik of the University of Mainz.Despite their differences, the three slave-holding Temnothorax species appear to share two genes that are important for the raids. "Acyl-CoA Delta (11) Desaturase causes the attackers to emit chemical scents during the raid. These scents mask the attackers, thereby increasing the chances for a successful raid. On the other hand, the gene Trypsin-7 appears to affect the recognition potential, thus enabling -- at least in part -- the identification of the host colonies required for a raid," adds Feldmeyer in summary.
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New Species
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March 5, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180305130659.htm
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These tropical hummingbirds make cricket-like sounds other birds can't hear
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Researchers reporting in
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"These vocalizations are fast and high pitched, and in fact they do not sound at all like your typical bird sound," says Claudio Mello from Oregon Health and Science University. "They sound more like an insect, such as a cricket, or like a tree frog."Mello and his colleagues stumbled onto the discovery quite by accident while studying many species of hummingbirds in the forested mountains of Eastern Brazil."We heard prominent high-pitch sounds that sounded perhaps like a cricket or a tree frog," Mello says. "But then we noticed that the sounds were actually coming from these black hummingbirds."The researchers thought the vocalizations had to be at an unusually high pitch, but they didn't have the equipment needed to measure it. So, on a later trip, they took detectors with them that are normally used to pick up the high-frequency sounds of bats. They confirmed that the detectors picked up on these unusual hummingbird sounds.More recently, they made recordings of the sounds using special recording equipment designed to study bat calls. The recordings showed that the sounds were quite remarkable, having a high degree of complexity and being produced at high frequency, including components in the ultrasonic range that humans can't hear.The discovery suggests that either black jacobins hear sounds other birds can't or that the birds produce sounds they can't even hear. The researchers speculate that the birds might rely on the unusual calls as a private channel of communication. That could be especially useful given that black jacobins live among a diverse group of bird species, including 40 other species of hummingbirds."It seems more reasonable to assume they do hear the sounds they make, but we have not yet examined whether this is true," Mello says.Bird hearing generally has to be tested in a lab, either by recording from the brains of anesthetized birds or by watching how birds respond to sounds. Those studies aren't amenable to studying hummingbirds in the wild.The findings suggest that the hummingbirds must have an unusual vocal organ, the syrinx, to produce these sounds. "They would need to vibrate very quickly and likely have a special composition, which may be different from other birds," he says.Mello says it would now be interesting to study the black jacobins' inner ears to see how or whether they differ from those of other birds. And, if it turns out that the birds can't hear themselves? Well, that would raise a whole host of other intriguing questions.
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New Species
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March 5, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/03/180305130638.htm
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Deep-sea fish choose habitat according to genotype, new research says
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Scientists have found evidence of natural selection in a deep-sea fish species adapting to the depth of ocean that it inhabits.
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The team of researchers, led by Professor Rus Hoelzel in Durham University's (UK) Department of Biosciences (together with collaborators from the Department of Earth Sciences in Durham, the University of Liverpool and Marine Scotland), studied a species of fish called the roundnose grenadier.They say this is the first evidence of natural selection maintaining separate specialised types of the same species of fish, each adapting to different habitat depths within a single population spanning two kilometres of depth in the deep sea.Their study is published in the journal The researchers said that an important transition in the deep sea is where the penetration of light ends dividing the relatively vibrant mesopelagic from the dark bathypelagic part of the ocean below approximately 1,000m.The roundnose grenadier has a remarkably broad habitat range in the deep sea, from 180-2,600m in depth.The research looked at a section of ocean inhabited by this species running from 750m to 1,800m at a single location, crossing the boundary between the "light" and "dark" parts of the ocean.They sequenced the entire nuclear genome of this species, and identified all of the genes within that genome that code for biological functions. They then sequenced 60 more genomes, 15 from each of four depths (750m, 1,000m, 1,500m and 1,800m). This revealed adaptation to depth at functional genes, with all of the 1,800m fish different from the others that lived at shallower depths.Those adapted genes were associated with the building of different body forms and functions as the individual matures. Furthermore, they found strong evidence for ongoing natural selection such that either extreme form was favoured at the expense of the intermediate type.This "disruptive" selection can lead to the evolution of new species when the different types also mate preferentially with their own type.However, in this case, there was no clear evidence for mating with one's own type. Instead, the young ('fry') fish stay at approximately1,000m until they mature, and then segregate to different depths according to their genetic makeup.This provides a uniquely clear example of how different specialists within the same species, in this case adaption to life at different habitat depths, can be maintained even within the same geographic population. This might help prepare a species for a rapid response to a changing environment, such as rapid climate change.Differentiation among ecotypes may be driven by the distinction between a resource rich environment in shallower water, and a relatively resource poor environment deeper down the slope.Lead author, Professor Rus Hoelzel, in Durham University's, Department of Biosciences, said: "The oceans represent vast expanses across which there are few obvious barriers to movement."As in the environment above the sea, we tend to think about movement in a horizontal dimension, across the breadth of the oceans, but at sea there are perhaps even greater habitat boundaries and gradients as species move vertically with depth."Our research shows that these fish have adapted to life at different depths, and that they segregate by depth as they mature, based on their genetic makeup."The research was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 28, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180228144439.htm
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New tardigrade species Macrobiotus shonaicus sp. nov. identified in Japan
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A new tardigrade species has been identified in Japan, according to a study published February 28, 2018 in the open-access journal
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Tardigrades are microscopic metazoans that are found all over the world, and there were 167 known species from Japan. For decades, the globally distributed In this study, Stec and colleagues describe a new tardigrade species of the hufelandi group, To distinguish between different tardigrade species, the researchers paid special attention to their eggs. This new tardigrade species has a solid egg surface, placing it in the persimilis subgroup within the hufelandi complex. The eggs also have flexible filaments attached, resembling those of two other recently described species, The researchers' phylogenetic and morphological analysis identifies Co-author Kazuharu Arakawa says: "We revisit the large and long-standing
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 27, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180227142103.htm
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Tracking endangered mammals with the leeches that feed on them
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A broad survey conducted across southern Asia reinforces the idea that the mammal biodiversity of an area can be determined by looking at the DNA found in leeches' blood meals. The new study, led by researchers at the American Museum of Natural History, also shows for the first time that DNA found in leeches can be used to identify certain ground birds and, possibly, some bats. The research was published this month in the journal
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"Our recent work has demonstrated that we can determine what mammals are in a protected area without hunting, without trapping, without the use of scat or hair samples, and especially without camera traps-all of which are problematic methods for one reason or another," said study author Mark Siddall, a curator in the Museum's Division of Invertebrate Zoology. "Instead, by sequencing the host DNA that remains inside of terrestrial jungle leeches for months after feeding, we can out-perform all other methods of biodiversity monitoring in terms of accuracy, completeness, speed, and cost. We even get the small mammals that most other methods miss."The usefulness of invertebrate-parasite-derived DNA, called iDNA, was first shown in a 2012 study on 25 leeches found in Vietnam. Siddall and lead author Michael Tessler, a postdoctoral fellow in the Museum's Sackler Institute of Comparative Genomics, were interested in examining how dependable leeches can be as an identification tool when surveying a broader range of geographic locations. The researchers led a team that collected and genetically analyzed about 750 terrestrial leeches in the genus Haemadipsa from the forests of Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China. They found that the leeches feed at least somewhat indiscriminately on a large variety of mammals, including small deer called muntjacs, macaque monkeys, wildcats, rodents like porcupines and rats, as well as a vulnerable species in the area, a gaur, or Indian bison. They also recovered DNA from three types of ground-dwelling birds and one species of bat-there are only a few previous and somewhat anecdotal reports of those animals being targeted by Haemadipsa leeches.In addition, Siddall and Tessler were authors on a recently published study based on leeches in Bangladesh that compares the iDNA method to camera traps. They found that the methods complement one another, and that, when used together with camera trapping, leeches can be used to survey more rapidly and to more confidently identify small mammal species."This work is turning out to be an extremely useful tool for conservation purposes, and it's quick and easy to survey a park in this way as you don't really need to search for the leeches-they come to you looking for a meal," Tessler said. "You just go on a casual hike and make sure you get the leeches before they get you. A snapshot of the vertebrates in an area can be taken with just one day's worth of sampling; the current standard for surveys, camera traps, takes months or longer."The new research also looks at the genetic diversity of the leeches themselves, revealing that there are most likely many new species yet to be described.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 27, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180227094726.htm
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Smallest monkey's evolutionary secret
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Evolutionary biologists have now discovered that the Pygmy Marmoset -- the world's smallest monkey -- is not one species but two.
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Weighing in at just 100 grams -- roughly the size of a large tomato -- the insect-eating primate was first described scientifically in 1823 by German naturalist Johann Spix as Cebuella pygmaea, with a sub-species subsequently found.Now a team led by the University of Salford, using the latest techniques in genomics and phylogenetics, have established proof of two clades or branches of pygmy marmosets, that have diverged from one another around 2 -- 3 million years ago.The study was restricted to monkeys in the Brazilian Amazon, but there are indications that researchers may discover more species with further research in the forests of the other countries where they live.Findings like this have serious implications for conservation, since population numbers essentially are halved when a species is suddenly split in two in the light of new scientific evidence. Luckily for the pygmy marmosets, the forests where they are found are amongst the best preserved patches of Amazon, the scientists say.The study, led by Jean Boubli, professor of tropical ecology and conservation, at Salford University, UK, and the first ever to use genomics to investigate the evolutionary history of a group of New World primates, is published in Molecular Phylogenics and Evolution.The team, which included scientists from four Brazilian research institutes and US-based Conservation international, found one of the distinct Pygmy Marmoset species is found in Brazil's Japurá basin, extending west into Colombia, northern Peru and Ecuador, while the other, is found south of the Amazon River, east to the Madeira River in Brazil, and possibly extending into Peru and Bolivia.They employed genome sequencing (ddRADseq) to study the evolutionary history of Cebuella and found two lineages.Professor Boubli said: "There has long been confusion over the taxonomy of these wonderful creatures mostly because Spix did not record in his travel diaries the exact location where he collected the type of Cebuella pygmaea in the early 1800s. That creates confusion as to which of the two recently uncovered species should keep the original name; that of the north or of the south of the Amazon."The beauty of genomics means that we can now see the pygmy marmoset is a term for two species which have been evolving independently for nearly 3 million years."According to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Pygmy Marmosets are species of "Least Concern." But recent disease epidemics resulting have prompted the IUCN Species Survival Commission's Primate Specialist Group to recommend updating that status to Vulnerable.The team is now collecting more data including feces from different localities to clarify the taxonomy of Pygmy Marmosets and the geographic ranges of the two species already identified -- and possibly even that of new ones.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 26, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180226181543.htm
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Fossil turtle species, 5.5 million years old, sheds light on invasive modern relatives
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A University of Pennsylvania paleontologist has described a 5.5 million-year-old fossil species of turtle from eastern Tennessee. It represents a new species of the genus Trachemys, commonly known as sliders, which are frequently kept as pets today.
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Steven Jasinski, author of the new study, is a doctoral student at the University of Pennsylvania and acting curator of paleontology and geology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania. He is completing his Ph.D. at Penn under Peter Dodson, a professor of paleontology in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science in the School of Arts and Sciences and a professor of anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine.The study investigated a fossil turtle found around the Miocene-Pliocene boundary in the Gray Fossil Site, an area rich with fossils in eastern Tennessee near East Tennessee State University, where Jasinski completed his master's degree. The site represents an ancient sinkhole surrounded by a forest from which dozens of fossil animal species have been characterized, including new species of red panda, Eurasian badger, kinosternid turtle, and colubrid snake.Thorough examination of the dozens of turtle fossils from the site revealed important differences between this turtle and other known fossil and living species. Jasinski named the fossil turtle Trachemys haugrudi, after Shawn Haugrud, the lab and field manager and lead preparer at the Gray Fossil Site."Shawn has spent an incredible number of hours working on these specimens," Jasinski said. "He cleaned and prepared the fossils and was able to essentially glue this turtle back to life, giving me numerous nearly complete turtle shells to use in this research. Without all that time and effort, I wouldn't have been able to determine nearly as much about this turtle as I did."Shawn also didn't do this work alone, as numerous other people including volunteers worked on these fossils and got them prepared so that I could complete my research. They really did all the hard work, and I was then able to determine why it was new and what its implications are" he said.Turtles are best known for their shells, and indeed it is this feature of their anatomy that is commonly found as fossils. Yet the fossil shells are typically found in broken pieces. Often gaps or holes remain, or only single small pieces are found, and the whole must be inferred from other information, including other fossil and living creatures."It is extremely rare to get more complete fossils," Jasinski said, "but Trachemys haugrudi, commonly called Haugrud's slider turtle, provides me with dozens of shells, and several are nearly complete."Haugrud's slider turtle was a fairly small turtle, not more than approximately 10 inches (25 cm) in total shell length, smaller than the modern-day red-eared slider turtle, Trachemys scripta elegans. Red-eared slider turtles are commonly purchased as pets, though they can grow large, and some owners release them into the wild. As a result, though native to the southeastern United States, red-eared sliders have become one of the most invasive animal species in the world today, found on every continent except Antarctica."People tend to see all turtles as similar and release them into whatever pond or river is close by when they no longer want to care for them," Jasinski said. "Once released, however, they often outcompete native species. It is a problem that scientists are still dealing with."As part of the study, Jasinski sought to determine where Trachemys haugrudi was positioned in the evolution of similar turtles both within the genus and in related genera. He performed a phylogenetic analysis, a method that compares shapes and features of different species to determine how similar or dissimilar and therefore how closely related they may be. He found Haugrud's to be most closely related to a group of fossil Trachemys turtles from Florida and next most closely related to a distinct group of fossil Trachemys from the midwestern U.S. Together, these fossil Trachemys form a closely related group situated within other still-living species of Trachemys.Today, distinct, closely-related groups of Trachemys species dwell in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. Jasinski's investigation, along with other information from previous studies, indicates that one group evolved in Mexico and Central and South America and evolved into different species within this geographic area, and another group evolved separately in the Caribbean.Species from the U.S., including the red-eared slider turtle, are found near the base of their "branch" of the Trachemys family tree; their fossil ancestors are still waiting to be discovered. The fossil Trachemys species in Jasinski's analysis are on a distinct part of the Trachemys tree, and current understanding suggests that they did not give rise to the modern species living today.The findings imply that there was once much greater diversity in Trachemys turtles than exists today. It seems that many of the ancient slider species died out without leaving any direct descendents, perhaps because they lacked the ability to adapt to different environments."While Trachemys turtle species are considered plastic, implying they can adapt to and live in many environments, this adaptive lifestyle may be a relatively newer characteristic of these turtles," Jasinski said. "More fossils are needed to better understand if this aspect of their evolution is a recent addition."To get a handle on invasive turtles, understanding more about their ancient relatives could only be helpful, Jasinski said."Trachemys haugrudi helps provide more information on Trachemys and begins to offer us insights into the evolution of an animal that has become a problematic invader in many areas of the world," he said. "Understanding how something evolved into its present form may help us understand why an animal is so adaptive and good at invading new areas and outcompeting native species. If we can see that Trachemys today are especially adaptive because evolution has allowed them to become more generalized through time, we can use that information to determine where they may invade, what species they may outcompete and what we can do to counteract those invasions or help native species compete against them."Jasinski is undertaking further study into the fossil species of not only Trachemys but other turtles within the family Emydidae, which includes Trachemys. He hopes that further data and fossils will help shed light on other turtle species and provide a clearer understanding of the evolution of this group of mainly New World turtles.The study was supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant 0958985 to Steven Wallace and the Gray Fossil Site), Office of Research and Sponsored Programs at East Tennessee State University, Don Sundquist Center of Excellence in Paleontology, State Museum of Pennsylvania, and Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 23, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180223151844.htm
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Why are there so many types of lizards?
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Lizards have special superpowers. While birds can regrow feathers and mammals can regrow skin, lizards can regenerate entire structures such as their tails. Despite these differences, all have evolved from the same ancestor as lizards.
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Spreading through the Americas, one lizard group, the anoles, evolved like Darwin's finches, adapting to different islands and different habitats on the mainland. Today there are more than 400 species.Constructing a family tree for three lizard species collected in Panama at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and a fourth from the southeastern U.S., scientists at Arizona State University compared lizard genomes -- their entire DNA code -- to those of other animals.The researchers discovered that changes in genes involved in the interbrain (the site of the pineal gland and other endocrine glands), for color vision, hormones and the colorful dewlap that males bob to attract females, may contribute to the formation of boundaries between species. Genes regulating limb development also evolved especially quickly."While some reptiles such as tortoises changed remarkably little over millions of years, anole lizards evolved quickly, generating a diversity of shapes and behaviors," said Kenro Kusumi, corresponding author and professor at ASU School of Life Sciences. "Now that sequencing entire genomes is cheaper and easier, we discovered molecular genetic evidence for rapid evolution that may account for striking differences between bodies of animals living in different environments."Kusumi's lab, working with colleagues at the University of Arizona College of Medicine-Phoenix, is especially interested in how reptiles' genomes shape their ability to regenerate and to develop a diversity of body forms."This is the first time the complete genetic code -- the genome -- of any vertebrate species from Panama has been sequenced and analyzed," said Oris Sanjur, co-author and Associate Director for Science Administration at STRI. "Information from these three species is an important contribution to our understanding of biodiversity and the evolution of new species."Scientists estimate that there are 40 species of anolid lizards living in Panama, compared to only one in the U.S. A team from ASU collected three species with permission from the Ministry of the Environment, MiAmbiente: the Central American giant anole, Anolis frenatus, lives high on tree trunks; the grass anole, A. auratus, perches on bushes or on grassy vegetation and the slender anole, A. apletophallus, found only in Panama, hangs out lower on tree trunks or on the ground.Researchers at ASU's School of Life Sciences lined up the DNA sequences of the lizards with the DNA sequences of 31 other animals: the lobe-finned fish and the four-legged animal groups that evolved from them. They also took a careful look at genes that code for proteins: more than 22,000 genes in the green anole, A. carolinensis, versus approximately 20,000 identified each in A. auratus and A. frenatus and 13,000 in A. apletophallus.One obvious explanation for a faster rate of evolution is the anole lizards' faster rate of reproduction. Anoles typically mate in their first year of life, while other reptiles take much longer to reach sexual maturity. They also breed with many other individuals so mutations that make it difficult for individuals to survive are eliminated fairly quickly.The first and only other anole lizard to be sequenced previously was the green anole, A. carolinensis, the only anole species resident in the U.S. In that study from MIT, the A. carolinensis genome held evidence of more recent evolution and the loss of ancient repeated elements in the part of the DNA that does not code for proteins. In this sense, it was important to sequence the three Panamanian species, because the U.S. species may not be the most representative of the diverse anole group."For 15 years, an impressive amount of time and money poured into discovering the genomes of mammals, motivated by our drive to understand human evolution and to look for cures for disease. Even though the squamate reptiles include more than 10,000 species -- almost double the number of mammal species -- a single genome was not enough to understand the variability within this group," said the first author of the report, Marc Tollis, a post-doctoral fellow at ASU."By comparing these four anole lizard genomes, we're beginning to understand how one of the most diverse groups of vertebrates regenerate, develop and diversify," he added.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 22, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180222162129.htm
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Few Chicagoland wetlands left without non-native species, study finds
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The wetlands in and around Chicago are overwhelmingly invaded by non-native plants, according to a new study by University of Illinois researchers. The study, which pulls together species occurrence data from over 2,000 wetlands in the urban region, is the first to describe wetland invasion patterns on such a large scale in the Chicagoland area.
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The data came from a decade's worth of environmental assessments, a required step in any new road or building construction project. Normally, once these assessments are submitted to regulatory agencies, they're filed away and rarely seen again. But the U of I researchers suspected that, together, the assessments contained a goldmine of information."For us, it was a shame that all of these data are available and are not being used to answer some large questions about the state of natural communities across the region. Compiling them into a large regional data set allowed us to answer questions at a large scale that hadn't been addressed before," says Jeff Matthews, assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences at U of I, and co-author on the study.The main question had to do with the degree of invasion by non-native plants in Chicagoland wetlands. And the answer was staggering."We have worked in the Chicago region long enough that we thought we knew the extent of the problem. But even having that past experience and knowing that invasive species are pervasive, the numbers were still shocking to me," Matthews says.Non-native plant species were present in over 99 percent of the wetlands in the data set, and, on average, non-natives made up over a third of the species present in individual wetlands. One species in particular, reed canary grass, was nearly ubiquitous: it was found in some 74 percent of the surveyed sites.Being non-native is not necessarily a bad thing -- many of our most important crops are non-native -- but when non-native species thrive and steal space and nutrients from native plants, that's a problem. And with a third or more of the native species being replaced by non-natives, ecosystems can be inextricably altered."We saw a recurrence of certain groups of non-native species that are associated with major roads," Matthews says. "We assume this linked to road salt, because most of the species in these recurring groups are highly tolerant of salt; they're actually maritime species that have moved in from the coast. We're seeing the same collection of species throughout the Chicago region along the tollways and major interstates."Invasions can happen anywhere that aggressive non-native species are introduced, but the researchers say urban centers like the metropolitan Chicago area are at greater risk."Urbanization can lead to loss or extirpation of species entirely from a region, through habitat loss and pressure from non-native species," says Dennis Skultety, a GIS/GPS specialist with the Illinois Natural History Survey at U of I, and the lead author on the study. "Urban areas are an introduction point for non-native species, whether they're coming in through commerce as hitchhikers on trucks or ships, or are intentionally introduced through the horticultural industry or pet trade."Although the overall picture looks bleak, Matthews says even invaded wetlands have value. "These wetlands still provide flood water storage, improve water flowing through those sites, and provide wildlife habitat to some extent."Skultety says that a practical lesson from the work is to redefine what is achievable for wetland restoration in urban areas. "We should focus more on the functional values that wetlands provide, and not necessarily get hung up on a single metric of vegetation quality."
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180221122915.htm
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Asian elephants have different personality traits just like humans
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Researchers of the University of Turku, Finland, have studied a timber elephant population in Myanmar and discovered that Asian elephant personality manifests through three different factors. The personality factors identified by the researchers are Attentiveness, Sociability and Aggressiveness.
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As is commonly known, people have different personalities, and the structure of human personality can be divided into five factors. Other species' behaviour also differs between individuals: some are braver, more social, or aggressive than others."These kinds of consistent differences in behaviour are called personality. Personality studies on other species than humans have so far focused on primates, pets and zoo populations, or on species that have a relatively short lifespan. Besides humans, personality studies on other long-lived species living in their natural habitat are rare," says Postdoctoral Researcher and the lead author of the study Martin Seltmann from the Department of Biology at the University of Turku.The researchers of the University of Turku studied a semi-captive population of timber elephants in Myanmar and discovered that Asian elephants have three different personality factors: Attentiveness, Sociability and Aggressiveness. The researchers also identified that male and female elephants do not differ in these three personality factors."Attentiveness is related to how an elephant acts in and perceives its environment. Sociability describes how an elephant seeks closeness to other elephants and humans, and how popular they are as social partners. Aggressiveness shows how aggressively an elephant acts towards other elephants and how much it interferes in their social interaction," describes Dr Seltmann.The researchers studied the personality of over 250 timber elephants living in their natural habitat in Myanmar."The elephants work in the timber industry, pulling logs from one place to another. This is a very unique research environment and population, enabling us to study several hundreds of elephants," says Dr Seltmann.All the elephants work with their own mahout, i.e. an elephant rider. This social relationship can last throughout the elephant's lifetime. Therefore, the mahouts know the behaviour of their elephant very well and can give detailed information on their personalities."We met elephants that were clearly more curious and braver than others. For example, they always tried to steal the water melons that were meant as rewards," says Dr Steltmann.The researchers collected data for the study with questionnaires on the elephants' personalities. The surveys were conducted in Myanmar in 2014-2017. The questions were directed to the mahouts and they had to assess the elephant's behaviour according to 28 different traits. The mahouts assessed how often the elephant displayed a particular behaviour on a 4-point scale."Elephants and humans have many similar characteristics in their life-history and behaviour. Among other things, elephants have a very long lifespan and give birth to a single calf at a time, who in turn needs the care of the mother and other females for a long time after birth. Living in complex social environments could be a reason why both species have developed such complex personality structures," says researcher Mirkka Lahdenperä from the University of Turku, who participated in the study.The study sheds more light on how personality develops in a long-lived, social species. This research on Asian elephants can also facilitate the protection of the species as well as improve the well-being and management of individuals in the timber elephant population in Myanmar.
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 21, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180221122847.htm
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The conflict between males and females could replace the evolution of new species
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New research shows that males and females of the same species can evolve to be so different that they prevent other species from evolving or colonising habitats, challenging long-held theories on the way natural selection drives the evolution of biodiversity.
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According to Darwin's theory of natural selection, first introduced in his book On the Origin of Species (1859), new environments such as mountains and islands with abundant food and habitats, offer species the 'ecological opportunity' to colonise an area using those resources.New research from the UK has shown that exactly the same mechanism of evolution that creates new species also operates within the same species when males and females compete for the ecological resources available in different habitats, such as bushy areas or stony patches with abundant food. The conflict between the sexes can lead to one sex becoming bigger, more colourful or adapting to eat different food, just like a traditional process of evolution by natural selection can lead an ancestor to split into two different species.This process of evolution between the sexes expands the biodiversity of the area -- a development that evolutionary biologists previously thought only occurred when the number of different species using different resources or 'niches' increases. This new research challenges that assumption, showing that different species and different sexes of the same species can occupy these niches.This new research which explored the evolution of lizards in the Chilean Andes Mountains and Argentinean Patagonia, shows that different sexes of the same species can fill niches as well, meaning new species are actively prevented from evolving. This is because there is no new environment for them to occupy -- a necessary condition for new species to evolve under Darwin's theory of natural selection.Conducted by academics from the Universities of Lincoln, Exeter and Sheffield, the study demonstrated that biodiversity can now be seen as the formation of new, different species, or, as the formation of different sexes which are distinct enough to be equivalent to different species in the way they 'saturate' ecological niches.Dr Daniel Pincheira-Donoso, Senior Lecturer in Evolutionary Biology at the School of Life Sciences at the University of Lincoln and lead researcher on the study, said: "Our research reveals evidence for this intriguing phenomenon that the evolution of sexes within a species could replace the evolution of new species, which begins to add a new layer to our understanding of the evolution of biodiversity."It is important to stress that the diversity of life on our planet applies not only to the evolution of different species, but also to the independent evolution of males and females within the same species, which potentially has very important implications."
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New Species
| 2,018 |
February 20, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220123044.htm
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Extreme-altitude birds evolved same trait via different mutations
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On the Himalayan-enveloped Tibetan Plateau and the Altiplano plateau of South America -- the world's two highest tabletops -- a select few bird species survive on 35 to 40 percent less oxygen than at sea level.
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All extreme-altitude birds have evolved especially efficient systems for delivering that precious oxygen to their tissues. But a new study led by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Chinese Academy of Sciences has found that these birds often evolved different blueprints for assembling the proteins -- hemoglobins -- that actually capture oxygen.Published in the Those mutational differences often emerged even among closely related species residing on the same plateau, the study reported."You could imagine, just because of the different ancestral starting points, that the Tibetan birds maybe all went one (mutational) route, and the Andean birds typically did things a different way," said co-author Jay Storz, Susan J. Rosowski Professor of biological sciences at Nebraska. "But that's not what we saw. Across the board, there weren't really any region-specific patterns."In both cases, it seems like there were many different ways of evolving a similar alteration of protein function."Like all proteins, hemoglobin consists of intricately folded chains of amino acids. The interactions among those amino acids dictate the structure of a protein, which in turn determines its properties -- how readily it binds with and releases oxygen, for instance. But a mutation can effectively swap out an amino acid for a chemically distinct version at the same site in the protein, potentially modifying its behavior in the process.After comparing the ancestral vs. modern hemoglobin proteins of nine species that inhabit the Tibetan Plateau, the team did identify two cases in which distantly related species underwent identical, functionally important mutations. Yet in the other instances, species evolved different ways to build a better hemoglobin.The latest findings reinforce a 2016 Storz-led study published in the journal "Birds that have adapted to high-altitude conditions from all these different mountain ranges have repeatedly evolved hemoglobin with elevated oxygen affinities," Storz said. "At that (functional) level, everything is highly repeatable, and there's a very striking pattern of convergent evolution. But in terms of the actual molecular underpinnings, there's far less predictability, and it's clear that there are many possible changes that can produce the same functional outcome."
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New Species
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February 20, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220122928.htm
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New shark species confirmed
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A team of scientists led by Florida Institute of Technology's Toby Daly-Engel has confirmed after decades of uncertainty that sixgill sharks residing in the Atlantic Ocean are a different species than their counterparts in the Indian and Pacific oceans.
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The new species has a new name: the Atlantic sixgill shark.With ancestors dating back over 250 million years, well before dinosaurs, sixgill sharks are among the oldest creatures on Earth. Yet the fact that they reside at extreme ocean depths, sometimes thousands of feet below the surface, has made them especially challenging to study.Using 1,310 base pairs of two mitochondrial genes, Daly-Engel, an assistant professor of biological sciences at Florida Tech, and colleagues from MarAlliance in Belize, Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory in Teresa, Florida, and the National Marine Fisheries Service, Southeast Fisheries Science Center in Panama City, determined there are enough genetic differences between what had long been considered a single species, Hexanchus nakamurai, to rename the Atlantic variety Hexanchus vitulus."We showed that the sixgills in the Atlantic are actually very different from the ones in the Indian and Pacific Oceans on a molecular level, to the point where it is obvious that they're a different species even though they look very similar to the naked eye," Daly-Engel said.Their findings were reported in the journal p>Measuring up to 6 feet in length, Atlantic sixgill sharks are far smaller than their Indo-Pacific relatives, which can grow to 15 feet or longer. They have unique, saw-like lower teeth and six gill slits, as their name suggests. Most sharks have five gill slits.With their new classification, Atlantic sixgill sharks will now have a better chance at long-term survival, Daly-Engel noted."Because we now know there are two unique species, we have a sense of the overall variation in populations of sixgills. We understand that if we overfish one of them, they will not replenish from elsewhere in the world," she said.And that's the other benefit of this research: a better understanding of shark diversity."Particularly diversity in the deep ocean," Daly-Engel said, "which we don't know much about."
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New Species
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February 20, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220095000.htm
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Study of mollusk epidemic could help save endangered sea snail
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Abalone, large single-shelled mollusks, are an unusual sight these days off the coast of Washington, California, and Oregon. Of seven species of abalone on the west coast, two are endangered and three are considered species of concern. And one of the two species that is not considered threatened, the red abalone, saw a population crash last year that led fisheries managers to close the recreational fishery for 2018 in California.
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Though the decline of abalone was in large part driven by overfishing, restoration efforts are complicated by environmental change and now, a deadly disease called withering syndrome. In a new study funded by California Sea Grant, researchers shed new light on withering syndrome in three species of abalone, the red, the pink, and the pinto.The study shows that species adapted to colder waters may be more vulnerable to the illness, and that rising water temperatures lead to greater susceptibility. That means that as water temperatures increase, the disease could spread further north to northern California, Oregon, and Washington, affecting abalone farms that produce the shellfish for food as well as efforts to protect and restore native abalone species along the coast."Withering syndrome was first noticed in 1985, in the Channel Islands off of Southern California. Since then, it has spread both north and south along the coast, south into Mexico and as far north as Sonoma County," says University of Washington researcher Carolyn Friedman. The syndrome led to catastrophic die-offs of the now endangered wild black and cultured white abalone populations, and has been observed in other species such as the pink and red abalone."The initial clinical signs that one can observe are general and include weight loss and anorexia. A farmer might notice that the abalone are not eating as much and have become anorexic. Normally the body and foot of an abalone fill the entire volume of shell. When they are infected, you can see the mantle retracting from the edge of the shell," says Friedman. Once these signs of disease appear, the disease is incurable. The infected abalone die within one to three months. "Just wasting-withering-away," says Friedman.The cause of the disease has been identified-a bacterium related to the one that causes typhus in humans-but it wasn't clear why some species seemed to be more vulnerable than others. Also unknown was whether species currently outside of the epidemic's range could also be infected.In the new study, Friedman and a graduate student, University of Washington Ph.D. candidate Lisa Crosson, infected three species of abalone that range from California to Washington with the bacterium that causes withering syndrome, and exposed them to a range of water temperatures.They found that the pinto abalone, native to the chilly waters of Washington State and Canada, was the most vulnerable to withering syndrome, become infected and died at a water temperature of 17° Celsius (63° Fahrenheit). The red abalone, native to northern and central California, grew ill at 18° C (64° F), while the pink abalone, native to southern California, was the least vulnerable, and required a water temperature of 19°C (66° F) before succumbing."This was the first infection study with pinto abalone, where weve demonstrated that they're highly susceptible to infection, and have extremely low resistance to withering syndrome. The pinto [abalone] were the only species in experiment that experienced 100% mortality, while red and pink had less than 30% [mortality]," says Crosson.Friedman and Crosson also found that genetics may play a role-when they compared genetic markers from the three species with the white abalone (extremely vulnerable to the disease), they found a link between vulnerability and genetic relatedness to the white abalone.The research also serves as a warning of how climate change could impact already vulnerable species, and could prove useful for restoration efforts, along with forecasts of ocean temperature change."Marine animals do suffer from infectious disease, and temperature is a very important trigger. So if we can reduce ocean warming, we can reduce impacts that people may not even realize can happen," says Friedman.
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February 20, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180220093549.htm
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For green toads, species with multiple genomes have ancestors that are only distantly related
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Most vertebrates have two sets of chromosomes, one from their mother and one from their father -- including humans who are thus diploid. In contrast, polyploidy, meaning to possess three or more sets of chromosomes is very rare in animals. To find out how new vertebrate species have evolved, and, more generally, how the current biodiversity emerged, evolutionary biologists are studying green toads (
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Most polyploid fish, amphibians and reptiles are hybrids and contain the genetic material of two genetically separate parental forms: all chromosomes of the parental forms are retained and species with more than two chromosome sets evolve. In this way, new hybrid species can emerge within few generations, revealing characteristics and traits that neither parent lines have (transgressive traits). Consequently, polyploid hybrid speciation differs significantly from classic forms of speciation (including allopatric), which takes place over very long periods and in most cases due to spatial separation of populations. Both forms of speciation occur in green toads. Lineages of European diploid green toad species meet in several Eurasian regions after varying periods of time and mate -- however, without creating polyploid toads. In contrast, some only distantly related Asian green toads have produced species with three or four chromosome sets (tri- or tetraploidy).The authors compared their findings about the evolution of Eurasian green toads to data published on polyploid fish, amphibians and reptiles. "Presumably, one precondition for the successful evolution of polyploid vertebrates is a great evolutionary divergence of the ancestors, i.e. a high degree of genetic distance," explained Dr. Matthias Stöck, evolutionary biologist at IGB, summarizing the study's most important finding. Genetic examination revealed that only ancestors of polyploid green toads, which have diverged for about six million years, contributed to polyploid evolution. More closely related lineages have only formed hybrid toads with two chromosome sets (diploids).In addition, the researchers detected that the polyploid toad species have mainly evolved since the beginning of the Ice Age (approximately two million years ago). They assume that the polyploids adapted to more extreme climatic conditions due to the new traits provided by the "additional" chromosome sets, enabling them to occupy new ecological niches that are unavailable to the parental species.
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February 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180219155019.htm
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Biodiversity loss raises risk of 'extinction cascades'
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New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of "extinction cascades," where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions.
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The researchers, from the University of Exeter, showed there is a higher risk of extinction cascades when other species are not present to fill the "gap" created by the loss of a species.Even if the loss of one species does not directly cause knock-on extinctions, the study shows that this leads to simpler ecological communities that are at greater risk of "run-away extinction cascades" with the potential loss of many species.With extinction rates at their highest levels ever and numerous species under threat due to human activity, the findings are a further warning about the consequences of eroding biodiversity."Interactions between species are important for ecosystem (a community of interacting species) stability," said Dr Dirk Sanders, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall. "And because species are interconnected through multiple interactions, an impact on one species can affect others as well."It has been predicted that more complex food webs will be less vulnerable to extinction cascades because there is a greater chance that other species can step in and buffer against the effects of species loss."In our experiment, we used communities of plants and insects to test this prediction."The researchers removed one species of wasp and found that it led to secondary extinctions of other, indirectly linked, species at the same level of the food web.This effect was much stronger in simple communities than for the same species within a more complex food web.Dr Sanders added: "Our results demonstrate that biodiversity loss can increase the vulnerability of ecosystems to secondary extinctions which, when they occur, can then lead to further simplification causing run-away extinction cascades."The study, supported by France's Sorbonne Université, is published in the journal The paper is entitled: "Trophic redundancy reduces vulnerability to extinction cascades."The loss of a predator can initiate a cascade, such as in the case of wolves, where their extinction on one mountain can cause a large rise in the number of deer. This larger number of deer then eats more plant material than they would have before. This reduction in vegetation can cause extinctions in any species that also relies on the plants, but are potentially less competitive, such as rabbits or insects.
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February 14, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180214150157.htm
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Majority of Anna's hummingbirds may have feather mites on their tail feathers
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The majority of Californian Anna's Hummingbirds appear to have
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Hummingbirds are known to host a diversity of feather mites, but this relationship is not well-understood. In particular, mite distribution The researchers found that feather mites were present on the tail flight feathers of nearly 60 percent of Anna's hummingbirds, but less than 10 percent of the other species. Across all the species, the mite was more prevalent on the tail feathers of males (44.9 percent) than on those of females (36.2 percent), possibly because of the nesting habits of females.The authors used tabletop scanning electron microscopy to analyze individual feathers, building a detailed 3D picture of the distribution of live mites The authors state that their study provides the first prevalence and distribution information for these feather mites on both Anna's and Black-chinned Hummingbirds. This is especially important given that Anna's Hummingbirds co-reside seasonally with other hummingbird species, with the potential for spread of mites.Co-author Lisa Tell summarizes: "This study was exciting because not only were we able to document the presence of a mite on feathers from two species of hummingbirds found in California, but we were also able to examine the positioning of live feather mites
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February 13, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180213183617.htm
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Building a DNA barcode library for the Canadian flora using herbarium collections
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The dry, mothball-scented stacks of a herbarium might seem to be far away from the cutting edge of plant science. However, the curated plant specimens stored there contain irreplaceable genetic, morphological, ecological, and chemical information just waiting to be analyzed with modern techniques. In a new study in a recent issue of
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A DNA barcode library is a kind of molecular identification key that compiles DNA sequence (the "barcode") from each species in the library, focusing on a few well-studied, easily sequenced genomic regions. This allows future researchers to sample the DNA from an unknown species, sequence these regions, and easily find which species the sample came from by comparing the sequence to the library."These references are used for forensic identification of samples with a single DNA source, including direct identification of the plants if morphological characters are unavailable," said Dr. Kuzmina. They are also "in great demand in metagenomic projects for both practical and theoretical questions, like analyzing plant supplements and food, or environmental DNA in soil and water."Other studies, including those by Dr. Kuzmina, have previously demonstrated that herbarium specimens can produce DNA barcode libraries. This study stands apart in its scale, providing barcodes for 98% of the vascular plant species in Canada (5,076 of the 5,190). In total, the authors examined 13,170 individual specimens from 27 herbaria across Canada and the northern United States, supplemented by 7,660 freshly collected specimens. The scale of sampling makes the resulting DNA barcode library more powerful for species identification, because query sequences are less likely to match an incorrect, closely related reference species if the correct species is also present in the library.To assist future researchers in making use of herbarium resources, the authors also quantified the factors that influence DNA degradation in herbarium specimens. Unsurprisingly, the authors found that factors such as age and method of preservation affected the level of DNA degradation. They also found that the family to which the species belongs matters, because compounds present in some families but not others could affect DNA degradation."Our analysis is based on a large sample, which was parsed not only by age, but also by taxonomic affiliation, and we found that some groups of plants are capable of preserving DNA for a really long time," said Dr. Kuzmina. "The oldest specimen we succeeded to recover the DNA barcodes for our collection was collected in 1849. It belonged to lady's mantle (As Dr. Kuzmina and colleagues demonstrated, the genetic information stored in herbaria is an important resource for the 21st century. "In the herbarium you find specimens carefully collected, identified, and catalogued by several generations of professional field botanists, across the entire country, during all vegetative seasons, including distant areas, and rare findings," said Dr. Kuzmina.The high-quality curation and identification of each reference specimen by experts, and the traceability of each reference sequence back to a physical specimen lends the barcode library a level of taxonomic authority that only a herbarium can. "Annotated by experts, this material provides unparalleled source of references for those who perform molecular studies," said Dr. Kuzmina. "Without the fundamental knowledge about biodiversity the cutting edge sciences cannot operate."
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February 13, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180213154958.htm
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Longer-lived animals have longer-lived proteins
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Some proteins in the cell live longer than others. While it is established that the turnover rates of different proteins within a cell are highly variable, it is not known how conserved the turnover rates of the same proteins across species are.
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Researchers at University of Rochester led by Sina Ghaemmaghami attempted to answer this question by systematically measuring the proteome turnover kinetics in skin cells from eight different rodent species, including mouse, chiniclla and naked mole rat. The researchers used stable isotope labeling and mass spectrometry to quantify the rate of incorporation of heavy amino acid isotopes in order to calculate protein degradation rates and half-lives.The team observed two striking trends. First, more closely related species have higher correlations of proteome turnover kinetics. Second, the higher the maximum lifespan of the species, the lower the global protein turnover rates.To explain the latter unexpected trend, the investigators hypothesized that long-lived species may have evolved to reduce the energetic demands of continuous protein turnover, which would lessen the generation of reactive oxygen species and the subsequent oxidative damage.This study was published in
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New Species
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February 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212221536.htm
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Facial attraction: Red-fronted lemurs recognize photos of their own species
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Wild red-fronted lemurs (
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Researchers at the German Primate Center found that red-fronted lemurs spent significantly more time looking at pictures of conspecifics than at pictures of other, closely related species (heterospecifics).Dr Hanitriniaina Rakotonirina, the corresponding author said: "We were surprised to find that the animals appear to be able to differentiate among closely related sister species. For example, males of the rufous brown lemur (The time lemurs spent looking at pictures correlated with genetic difference; the more genetically different individuals were (which corresponded to how different they looked), the less time lemurs would spend looking at their pictures. Females showed a more pronounced response than males. This may indicate that female red-fronted lemurs perceive and respond to differences in fur patterns and coloration to recognize viable mates from their own species, enabling them to avoid costly interbreeding.The results also suggest sexual variation in color vision. Whereas male red-bellied lemurs are dichromatic (their eyes have receptors for two different colors), females can be dichromatic or trichromatic, allowing them to see three or more colors. However, the authors caution that the genetic tests required to test this assumption were not performed as part of this study.Dr Rakotonirina added: "These findings are particularly interesting because To test their hypothesis that red-fronted lemurs would respond more strongly to pictures of their own species and that females would show a stronger response than males, the authors showed eight female and seven male adult red-fronted lemurs pictures of five species that didn't occur in the same area (they were geographically separated). These included red-fronted lemurs and three closely related species -- white-fronted lemurs, brown lemurs and rufous brown lemurs -- as well as genetically more distant red-bellied lemurs.Experiments were conducted in Kirindy Forest, Western Madagascar, making this is the first study to test lemurs' ability to distinguish between conspecifics and heterospecifics in the wild, something that had only been tested in captive settings before.The authors also found that red-fronted lemurs spent more time sniffing at pictures of their own species than pictures of other species. Dr Rakotonirina said: "The fact that they not only looked at the pictures but also showed sniffing behavior suggests that they use two different sensory modalities, smell and sight, at the same time to differentiate between individuals of their own species from other
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New Species
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February 12, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212160859.htm
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'Middle Earth' preserved in giant bird dung
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While the giant birds that once dominated New Zealand are all extinct, a study of their preserved dung (coprolites) has revealed many aspects of their ancient ecosystem, with important insights for ongoing conservation efforts.
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Published in the The ancient dried dung originated from four species of extinct giant moa and the critically endangered kakapo parrot, and contained genetic records of diet, pathogens, and the behavior of the birds. Such detailed pictures of the pre-historic ecosystem are critical for present-day ecological restoration efforts, but are not available from the conventional fossil record of preserved skeletons.The ancient dung samples were excavated from caves and rockshelters across New Zealand by Dr Jamie Wood, of Landcare Research. He says, "Coprolites were actually more common than we'd thought, once we started looking for them. And it turns out they contain a huge range of important information about past ecosystems."Lead author Alex Boast, a PhD student at Landcare Research says, "A key finding was that the giant birds were eating a wide range of mushrooms and fungi, including species that are critical for the beech forests that are widespread across New Zealand. The brightly colored mushrooms remain distinctive parts of these forests today, but it appears they were meant to be eaten and then distributed by the moa."Worryingly, introduced mammals which consume these mushrooms don't appear to produce fertile spores, so this critical ecosystem function of the giant birds has been lost -- with serious implications for the long-term health of New Zealand's beech forests."The research was performed at ACAD where Postdoctoral Research Associate and microbiome specialist, Dr Laura Weyrich, says, "Moa coprolites contained a surprising diversity of parasites, many completely new to science. Several parasites appear to be specialized to single moa species, so that a range of parasites became extinct with each moa species. As a result, we have probably underestimated the loss of biodiversity associated with the extinction of the megafauna."ACAD Director, Professor Alan Cooper, who led the study, says, "The wide diversity of DNA we retrieved from the dung has allowed us to reconstruct many aspects of the behavior and interactions of species that we've never been able to see before. This important new method allows us to see how prehuman ecosystems have been altered, which is often hard to identify, and to guide our efforts in correcting some of the resulting damage."
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February 9, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209131610.htm
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Mutation in single rice gene cancels interspecific hybrid sterility
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Scientists successfully employed mutagenesis to identify the gene that causes hybrid sterility in rice, which is a major reproductive barrier between species.
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Their success is expected to help elucidate the genetic basis of interspecific hybrid sterility, which is important not only for understanding the evolutionary biology of speciation, but also for improving crops for food production.There are only two cultured rice species: an Asian one (To identify the cause of this infertility, Assistant Professor Yohei Koide and Associate Professor Akira Kanazawa of Hokkaido University along with their collaborators Senior Researcher Yoshimichi Fukuta from JIRCAS and Professor Yutaka Okumoto from Kyoto University focused on the S1 gene locus, which is known to be involved in hybrid sterility. The team created numerous hybrid seeds heterozygous for the S1 locus, which were then subjected to heavy-ion beam irradiation to induce mutations. The irradiation experiments were conducted at RIKEN.While screening for mutants, they found plants that yielded seeds, thus fertile, despite being heterozygous for the SThe team then researched the evolutionary pathways of “Our study shows the interspecific reproductive barrier can be overcome by a disruption of a single gene. Further research could help improve breeding programs and enhance rice yields to address food shortages in growing populations,” says Yohei Koide.
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February 9, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180209114334.htm
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New unknown Bryozoa genera and species below thousand meters deep in the Southwestern Atlantic
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A scientific team has discovered twenty new species and two genera for unknown Bryozoa -most of them were found below 1000 meters deep- in the Southwestern Atlantic, according to an article published in the journal
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Bryozoa are aquatic and colonial invertebrates that can produce mineralized skeletons. This is the study with the largest identification of new bryozoan species below a thousand meters deep -- that is, in the continental slope -- in the Argentine Patagonia, an area where most of the identified species had been found above five hundred meters. The new species were collected during five oceanographic campaigns -from 2008 to 2010- of IEO's ATLANTIS Project, on board the research vessel This area is one of the most productive marine ecosystems in the Southern Hemisphere due the confluence of two of the most powerful wind-driven currents: the Falkland Current -very rich in nutrients- and the subtropical Brazil Current. In particular, the current of the Malvines is a branch of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which flows northward along the continental shelf of Argentina -under 800 or 1000 meters- to about latitude from 30º to 40º S, where it is deflected eastward after meeting the warm southward-flowing Brazil Current," says Blanca Figuerola (UB-IRBio), who is now collaborating with the team led by Aaron O'Dea in the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama.When these powerful marine currents converge, there is a high biological production, promoting the growth of benthic invertebrates. "Therefore, this area is dwelled by particular species with a wide range of distributions and adaptations to fluctuating conditions, resulting from the influence of these subtropical and subantarctic waters," adds Figuerola.The findings of two genera (Some discovered species belong to genera from which only two species were known: in particular, the Curiously, the species Studying the biodiversity in the continental slope and the abyssal plain of the Patagonian and Antarctic regions is essential to complete the taxonomy and biogeography of some lineages that inhabit these unique ecosystems. The new findings will also provide new views on the study of comparative diversity among invertebrate communities from the last separated fragments of Gondwana, the ancient supercontinent. This is, for example, the case of According to Blanca Figuerola, "the findings of The discovery of new marine invertebrate species in South America has rapidly increased since mid-18th century. The new species of the research study were found in the area of eastern Patagonia. In other studies that were published in journals such as"Many studies on the biodiversity in the area of the continental slope and abyssal plains are to be done yet. We know some bryozoan genera can incorporate significant amounts of magnesium to their skeletons; therefore they are more soluble and more susceptible to the oceanic acidification than skeletons containing lower magnesium levels. It will be necessary to carry out studies on the distribution, abundance and mineralogy to assess whether these species are suitable as model organisms to study the effects of climate change in oceans," concludes Blanca Figuerola.
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February 8, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208141340.htm
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Evolution -- and skill -- help hefty hummingbirds stay spry
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Evolved differences in muscle power and wing size -- along with a touch of skill -- govern hummingbirds' inflight agility, according to new research in
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The findings by University of British Columbia biologists show that larger species of hummingbirds, despite their increased mass, are able to adapt to outmaneuver smaller species."Studies of bats, birds and other animals show that increases in body mass can have a detrimental effect on many aspects of flight," says Roslyn Dakin, co-lead author on the study."But with hummingbirds, the correlated evolution of increased wing size and muscle mass helps larger species compensate for their greater body masses."Dakin, study co-lead Paolo Segre and senior author Douglas Altshuler used sophisticated video capture and a novel geometrical framework to determine how maneuverability relates to differences in physiology -- notoriously difficult relationships to quantify.They found that acceleration is primarily driven by a bird's muscle capacity, whereas maneuvers involving rotations are driven primarily by wing size. But skill also plays a role."The hummingbirds tend to play to their strengths, especially with complex moves," says Altshuler. "For example, species that have the ability to power through turns tend to use more arcing trajectories, and they shy away from performing turns in which they decelerate to turn on a dime."The researchers captured over 200 individual hummingbirds from 25 Central and South American species. Computer vision technology developed by co-author Andrew Straw at the University of Freiburg in Germany enabled the researchers to record inflight maneuvers with precision."We recorded over 330,000 maneuvers, including many repeated maneuvers for each bird," says Segre, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University."Capturing that much data was a challenge. Our first field site was at a biological reserve deep in the Peruvian Amazon, an area with many species of hummingbirds, but only accessible by boat. We ran our computers and cameras using solar panels and generators in a thatched hut with strategically placed rain buckets!"Hummingbirds vary greatly in body mass and wing shape -- and many species have evolved to perform at high elevation where the air density is low. That variety offers researchers a great opportunity to study how traits relate to agility in flight, says Dakin."There are a lot of questions we can look into now. How do these differences impact their ability to survive and find mates? If maneuverability is an advantage to some species, how do others get by with less agility? What is it about their lifestyle that differs?"
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February 8, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180208104213.htm
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Double trouble: Invasive insect species overlooked as a result of a shared name
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An invasive leaf-mining moth, feeding on cornelian cherry, has been gradually expanding its distributional range from its native Central Europe northwards for a period likely longer than 60 years. During that period, it has remained under the cover of a taxonomic confusion, while going by a name shared with another species that feeds on common dogwood.
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To reproduce, this group of leaf-mining moths lay their eggs in specific plants, where the larvae make tunnels or 'mines', in the leaves. At the end of these burrows, they bite off an oval section, in which they can later pupate. These cutouts are also termed 'shields', prompting the common name of the family, the shield-bearer moths.During a routine study into the DNA of leaf-mining moths, Erik van Nieukerken, researcher at Naturalis Biodiversity Center, Leiden, the Netherlands, discovered that the DNA barcodes of the species feeding on common dogwood and cornelian cherry were in fact so different that they could only arise from two separate species. As a result, Erik teamed up with several other scientists and amateur entomologists to initiate a more in-depth taxonomic study.Curiously, it turned out that the two species had been first identified on their own as early as in 1899, before being described in detail by a Polish scientist in the 50s. Ironically, it was another Polish study, published in the 70s, that regarded the evidence listed in that description as insufficient and synonymised the two leaf-miners under a common name (Now, as a result of the recent study undertaken by van Nieukerken and his collaborators, the two moth species -- "We now establish that the species feeding on common dogwood, While van Nieukerken and his team were working on the taxonomy of the moths, David C. Lees of the Natural History Museum, London, spotted a female leaf-miner in the Wildlife Garden of the museum. Following consultation with van Nieukerken, it turned out that the specimen in question was the first genuine Despite the lack of data for the British Isles, it is already known that, in continental Europe, the cornelian cherry-feeding species had established in the Netherlands and much of Germany in the 1990s.With common dogwood being widely planted, it is now suspected that "This discovery should provoke the attention of gardeners and other members of the public alike to the invasive leafminers attacking some of our much admired trees and shrubs, as we have demonstrated for the cornelian cherry -- a species well-known for its showy red berries in the autumn," says David Lees."Especially in Britain, we hope that they check their photos for the conspicuous leaf mines, recognisable by those oval cutouts, to see if they can solve the mystery of when the invasion, which is now prominent on cornels around London, actually started, and how fast it progresses. Citizen scientists can help."
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February 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207151850.htm
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New research reveals plant wonderland inside China's caves
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Exciting new data on cave flora has been published today in
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Over five years (2009-2014) the researchers delved into the depths of some of China's most unexplored and unknown caves in the largest ever study on cave floras. Surveying over 60 caves in the Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan regions, Kew's Alex Monro and his colleagues from Guangxi were able to assess the vascular plant diversity of cave flora in more detail than ever before.From the 1950's to the 1970's, forests in SW China was virtually wiped out due to the demand for charcoal associated with rapid industrialisation during China's Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. This study documents 31 species known only from caves, leading the team to speculate that cave populations are all that remain of species which once grew in the 'understory' (the layer of vegetation between the forest canopy and the ground), which has been wiped out by recent deforestation. This discovery makes these caves and their flora significant and valuable for species conservation in South West China.Lead researcher Alexandre Monro, at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew says; "This collaboration with the Guangxi institute of Botany in China is a first attempt to document the presence of vascular plants in caves in Southeast Asia. Before we started we had no idea of the diversity of plants in caves, or that so many species are known only from caves. We hope that this work will lead to a greater interest in caves amongst botanists, and also to a greater interest in plants amongst cave biologists, prompting more study of cave-rich landscapes in Southeast Asia."Over the course of the study, 418 species of vascular plants were recorded, with 7% of these species being endemic to caves and 37% of the species endemic to China. Once all caves have been samples in the region, the real figure is likely to be between 500 and 850 species, based on modelling conducted by this team.The other conclusion of the study is that the twilight zones in caves can be considered distinct biomes for plants based on a combination of constant and aseasonal climate, as well as very low light. The authors document plants growing in some of the lowest light levels recorded for vascular plants, suggesting a broad range of plants can photosynthesise at much lower light levels than originally thought.Whilst exploring the entrance caverns, the team observed that almost half of the caves sampled were impacted by tourism or agriculture, with tourism being the more frequent and impactful.
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February 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207090142.htm
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Rainforest collapse 307 million years ago impacted the evolution of early land vertebrates
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Researchers at the University of Birmingham have discovered that the mass extinction seen in plant species caused by the onset of a drier climate 307 million years ago led to extinctions of some groups of tetrapods, the first vertebrates to live on land, but allowed others to expand across the globe. This research is published today (7th February 2018) in the journal
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The Carboniferous and Permian periods (358 -- 272 million years ago) were critical intervals in the evolution of life on land. During the Carboniferous Period North America and Europe lay in a single land mass at the equator which was covered by dense tropical rainforests. These rainforests flourished because of the warm humid climate, providing an ideal habitat for early tetrapods (vertebrates with four limbs), allowing them to diversify into a variety of species.But towards the end of this period a major global environment change took place -- just as the number of tetrapod species began to increase, the rainforests started to disappear. The climate became much drier causing the mass extinction of many species within the dominant plant groups, such as horsetails and club mosses. Despite this being a catastrophic event for plants, it has been unclear how this affected the early tetrapod community.Previous attempts to estimate the diversity changes during this period have been hindered by the fossil record, which has not been sampled equally in different time intervals or geographic areas. To fill these gaps in the data, the Birmingham researchers compiled a new dataset from the Paleobiology Database and used advanced statistical methods to estimate diversity and biogeographic changes.The results of the study show that tetrapod diversity decreased after the rainforest collapse and the onset of drier conditions, largely due to the reduction in suitable habitats for amphibians which needed wet environments to survive.However they also found that after the rainforest collapse surviving tetrapod species began to disperse more freely across the globe, colonising new habitats further from the equator. Many of these survivors were early amniotes, such as early reptiles, whose generally larger size relative to early amphibians allowed them to travel longer distances, and their ability to lay eggs meant they were not confined to watery habitats.Emma Dunne, from the University of Birmingham's School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, said: 'This is the most comprehensive survey ever undertaken on early tetrapod evolution, and uses many newly developed techniques for estimating diversity patterns of species from fossil records, allowing us greater insights into how early tetrapods responded to the changes in their environment.'Dunne continued: 'We now know that the rainiforest collapse was crucial in paving the way for amniotes, the group which ultimately gave rise to modern mammals, reptiles and birds, to become the dominant group of land vertebrates during the Permian period and beyond.'
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February 7, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180207090128.htm
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New light shed on antibiotics produced by ants
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Ants, like humans, deal with disease. To deal with the bacteria that cause some of these diseases, some ants produce their own antibiotics. A new comparative study identified some ant species that make use of powerful antimicrobial agents -- but found that 40 percent of ant species tested didn't appear to produce antibiotics. The study has applications regarding the search for new antibiotics that can be used in humans.
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"These findings suggest that ants could be a future source of new antibiotics to help fight human diseases," says Clint Penick, an assistant research professor at Arizona State University and former postdoctoral researcher at North Carolina State University who is lead author of the study."One species we looked at, the thief ant (For this study, researchers tested the antimicrobial properties associated with 20 ant species. They did this by using a solvent to remove all of the substances on the surface of each ant's body. The resulting solution was then introduced to a bacterial slurry. The growth of the bacteria in the slurry was then compared to the growth of bacteria in a control group.If bacteria in a slurry that contained ant solution grew less than the control group, that meant that an antimicrobial agent was at work. For example, the slurry containing thief ant compounds showed no bacterial growth at all.The researchers found that 12 of the 20 ant species had some sort of antimicrobial agent on their exoskeletons -- including some species, like the thief ant, that hadn't previously been shown to do so. But eight of the ant species seemed not to make use of antibiotics at all. Or, at least, any antimicrobials on their exoskeletons were ineffective against the bacteria used in the study."Finding a species that carries a powerful antimicrobial agent is good news for those interested in finding new antibiotic agents that can help humans," Smith says. "But the fact that so many ant species appear to have little or no chemical defense against microbial pathogens is also important."That's because the conventional wisdom has long been that most, if not all, ant species carry antimicrobial agents. But this work indicates that the conventional wisdom is wrong."We thought every ant species would produce at least some type of antimicrobial," Penick says. "Instead, it seems like many species have found alternative ways to prevent infection that do not rely on antimicrobial chemicals.""The fact that not all ants use antimicrobials highlights the importance of refining our search for species that actually do hold promise for biomedical research," Smith says."For example, the thief ant is closely related to the red imported fire ant (The researchers caution that this study is a first step, and that this study does have limitations. For example, the researchers used only one bacterial agent in their tests, meaning it is not clear how each species would fare against other bacteria."Next steps include testing ant species against other bacteria; determining what substances are producing the antibiotic effects -- and whether ants produce them or obtain them elsewhere; and exploring what alternative strategies ants use to defend against bacterial pathogens," Smith says.
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February 6, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180206140655.htm
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Venus flytraps don't eat the insects that pollinate them
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While most people are familiar with Venus flytraps and their snapping jaws, there is still a lot that scientists don't know about the biology of these carnivorous plants. Researchers have for the first time discovered which insects pollinate the rare plants in their native habitat -- and discovered that the flytraps don't dine on these pollinator species.
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Venus flytraps ("These findings answer basic questions about the ecology of Venus flytraps, which is important for understanding how to preserve a plant that is native to such a small, threatened ecosystem," says Elsa Youngsteadt, a research associate at North Carolina State University and lead author of a paper on the work. "It also illustrates the fascinating suite of traits that help this plant interact with insects as both pollinators and prey.""Everybody's heard of Venus flytraps, but nobody knew what pollinated them -- so we decided to find out," says Clyde Sorenson, co-author of a paper describing the work and Alumni Distinguished Undergraduate Professor of Entomology at NC State.To that end, researchers captured insects found on Venus flytrap flowers at several sites during the plant's five-week flowering season. The researchers identified each insect and checked to see if they were carrying Venus flytrap pollen -- and, if they were carrying pollen, how much.Out of about 100 types of insects found on the flowers, only a few were both common and carrying a lot of pollen: a green sweat bee (The researchers also retrieved prey from more than 200 flytraps at the study sites. The three most important pollinator species -- despite being found so often on the flowers -- were never found in the traps."One potential reason for this is the architecture of the plants themselves," Youngsteadt says. "Venus flytrap flowers are elevated on stems that stand fairly high above the snap traps of the plant, and we found that 87 percent of the flower-visiting individuals we captured -- including all three of the most important species -- could fly. But only 20 percent of the prey could fly. The pollinator species may simply be staying above the danger zone as they go from flower to flower, making them less likely to be eaten."But other factors may also come into play."We know that the snap traps are different colors than the flowers, and may possibly lure different species," Sorenson says. "We don't yet know if they release different scents or other chemical signals that may also differentiate which portions of the plant are attractive to pollinators versus prey. That's one of the questions we plan to address moving forward."Researchers also plan to investigate additional Venus flytrap sites to see if the plant relies on these same core pollinator species in other parts of its native range."We also want to learn more about the flytrap's pollination biology," says Rebecca Irwin, study co-author and a professor of applied ecology at NC State. "How much and what kind of nectar do they produce? How much pollen do they need to reproduce successfully?"And we know that Venus flytraps need periodic fires in their native habitat in order to thrive, but how do these fire events -- and their aftermath -- affect the plant's reproductive success? There is still a lot to learn about these plants and their pollinators," Irwin says.
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February 6, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180206090658.htm
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There are more mammal species than we thought
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A recent study published in the
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The number of recognized mammal species has increased over time from 4,631 species in 1993 to 5,416 in 2005, and now to 6,495 species. This total includes 96 species extinct within the last 500 years, and represents nearly a 20% increase in overall mammal diversity. The updated tabulation details 1,251 new species recognitions, at least 172 unions, and multiple major, higher-level changes, including an additional 88 genera and 14 newly recognized families. The new study documents a long-term global rate of about 25 species recognized per year, with the Neotropics (Central America, the Caribbean, and South America) as the region of greatest species density, followed closely by tropical regions of Africa, Asia, and the Indo-Pacific.Previous sporadic releases of the Mammal Species of the World series, the latest edition of which was published in 2005, have resulted in the major time gap among estimates of mammal species number. Yet the continued steady flow of taxonomic changes proposed in peer-reviewed journals and books means that changes proposed more than a decade ago have yet to be incorporated centrally, until now. The lag between the publication and synthesis of research can hamper conservation efforts, since management decisions often depend upon the precise designation of distinctive animal populations."A big part of what we are aiming to do is centralize known information about mammal species diversity, and thereby democratize access to studying them," said Nathan Upham, the study's senior author and a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University.To update the count of global mammal species, the researchers reviewed more than 1,200 taxonomic publications appearing after the end-2003 cutoff date for Mammal Species of the World. These changes are recorded in a variety of monographs, books, and periodicals, many of which are difficult to access.The group of researchers included two students as co-first authors, Connor Burgin of Boise State University and Jocelyn Colella of the University of New Mexico, as well as a web programmer from Berkeley, California, Philip Kahn."Connor started keeping a list of known mammal species when he was 16," said Upham, who was introduced to an 18-year-old Burgin by Don Wilson, curator at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum in Washington, DC. Comparing Burgin's list to Upham's tally of species described from DNA data formed the basis for this new database.Efforts on the Mammal Diversity Database now focus on digitally linking species names to their original descriptions and to geographic populations, with the goal of establishing more accessible histories of taxonomic change. The group hopes to model the database on the real-time taxonomies already online for amphibians, birds, reptiles, and fishes."Mammals have lagged behind other groups in their taxonomic record-keeping," said Upham, "which is surprising given their relevance as models for disease and human origins. It's convenient to ignore taxonomy, so many people do -- but it's the essential language for how researchers communicate through time to study biological diversity."
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February 5, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180205151553.htm
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New alien species invasions still rising globally
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Up to 16% of all species on Earth could qualify as potential alien species and if they invade new regions, impacts will be difficult to predict, according to new research involving UCL.
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The study shows that the number of newly emerging alien species -- those never before encountered as aliens -- continues to rise, posing a significant challenge to biosecurity interventions worldwide.Approaches to tackle the growing issue largely rely on knowledge of species' invasion history elsewhere, giving new previously unrecorded alien species a higher chance of slipping through border controls and eluding early response management.The study, published today in Between the years 2000 and 2005, one quarter of records are of species that had not previously been found anywhere as an alien, which is a worryingly high proportion.For plants, mammals, and fishes, the proportion of newly emerging alien species has remained constant during the last 150 years but the total number of alien species has increased.Insects, molluscs and other invertebrates have the highest proportion of emerging alien species. Birds are the only group exempt from the trend, showing the lowest proportions of emerging alien species, with a distinct decline noted recently."Humans have been moving species to new places for thousands of years, so we might have expected that most species that have the potential to become aliens would already have done so. Instead, it seems the pool of new aliens is far from dry" explained study co-author, Professor Tim Blackburn (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment, and Zoological Society of London)."While most new records do relate to the spread of species we already knew were aliens, the fact that one in four relates to a completely new alien species is both surprising and troubling."Previously, growth in alien species numbers has been largely attributed to increases in import volumes, human mobility and land-degradation.However, statistical models in this study suggest that the high proportion of emerging alien species cannot be solely explained by these drivers and is actually likely to be due to the incorporation of new regions as a source of potential alien species. The team estimated that there are therefore many potential alien species yet to emerge."With measures being taken to prevent alien species introductions and spread, there has been a decline in the proportions of newly emerging alien species from established sources, such as historical European colonies. However, this decrease has been offset by newly emerging alien species elsewhere and it is likely that we can expect many more new invasions starting to appear from regions with large and growing economies," explained co-author Dr Ellie Dyer (UCL Genetics, Evolution & Environment and ZSL)."These findings will be extremely helpful for horizon scanning studies that aim to identify "door knocker" species, which are those not yet recorded but are suspected of presenting a high risk of arrival and detrimental impacts.UCL's contribution to this work was partly funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
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February 5, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180205141122.htm
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Controlling fire ants with natural compounds
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New research published in
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Native to South America, the red imported fire ant (Tatsuhiko Kadowaki, Makoto Tominaga and colleagues investigated the fire ant transient receptor potential (TRP) channel and found that it functions as a sensor of harmful conditions in its environment. Comparing it to the well-studied honey bee TRP channel, the researchers demonstrate that although it is similarly activated by heat, only eight of the 24 compounds that activated the honey bee TRP channel activated the fire ant version. Since the genes encoding this channel in each species are derived from a common ancestor, this suggests that the fire ant TRP channel has evolved to be less sensitive to the compounds that activate the honey bee TRP channel.
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February 5, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180205113050.htm
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Changing weather patterns throwing ecosystems out of whack
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Day and night will soon align, marking the start of spring. But the timing of nature's calendar is starting to fall out of sync.
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In a study published in "As species' lifecycles grow out of alignment, it can affect the functioning of ecosystems with potential impacts on human food supplies and diseases," said lead author Jeremy Cohen, PhD, postdoctoral researcher at the University of South Florida Department of Integrative Biology. "We rely on honeybees to pollinate seasonal crops and migratory birds to return in the spring to eat insects that are crop pests and vectors of human diseases. If the timing of these and other seasonal events are off, ecosystems can malfunction with potentially adverse effects on humans."Dr. Cohen and his team found that cold-blooded species and those with small body sizes are breeding or aggregating earlier than warm-blooded or large-bodied species in spring. They come to this conclusion after reviewing thousands of records of phenological shifts dating back to the 1950s."Our research elucidates the drivers of phenological responses and the traits of organisms that influence their ability to track changing climates," said co-author Jason Rohr, PhD, professor at the University of South Florida. "We expect these findings to improve our ability to forecast the locations, systems and species that might be at the greatest risk from climate change and ideally mitigate any adverse effects that these changes might have on the services that ecosystems provide to humans."
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February 2, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180202112656.htm
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Ecuador: Deforestation destroys more dry forest than climate change
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Tropical forests all over the world are at risk. Two of the main threats are the deforestation for arable land and climate change. Scientists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and the Thünen-Institute compared the losses due to deforestation with those that would result in extreme climate change scenarios in Ecuador. Although global warming is likely to change the distribution of species, deforestation will result in the loss of more dry forests than predicted by climate change damage.
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A large proportion of Ecuador's rare dry forests are located in the southwest of the country, in the Tumbes-Chocó-Magdalena region. These forests provide not only wood and non-wood products, but also important ecosystem services that regulate the water balance and protect the soil from erosion. However, the area suffers a high loss of habitat due to deforestation for more arable and pasture land. This exacerbates the negative effects of climate change, such as temperature increases.In cooperation with scientists from the Thünen-Institut and the Ecuadorian Universidad Técnica Particular de Loja, a team from TUM compared the predicted loss of area of tree species caused by deforestation on the one hand and by predicted forest losses in an extreme climate change scenario on the other. We have evaluated 660 data sets on the occurrence of 17 characteristic species of dry forests in the south of Ecuador," explain first author Carlos Manchego and Patrick Hildebrandt from the Chair of Silviculture at TUM -- "in order to estimate both potential threats, we have compared the forecast annual rates of losses. However, it is important that the results are not transferable to other tree species in other regions."Losses from conversions in the period 2008 to 2014, especially for agricultural and pasture land, averaged 71 square kilometres per year for all species in the study area. The predicted loss of species area in the climate change scenario was only 21 square kilometres per year.One unexpected outcome was the different displacement directions of tree species due to climate change. While some species migrate to the north, other species find their future distribution focus more to the south. This leads to a trend towards mixing tree species with hitherto unknown effects on the functionality and stability of future forest communities," says Hildebrandt. "At the same time, grubbing-up starts in the higher altitudes, because it's easier to grow something like corn there."According to Hildebrandt, it is important for efficient planning, the implementation of protective measures and sustainable land use to prioritise the measures according to such threats and weak points. A distinction must be made between the potential threats posed by climate change and deforestation. With the study "PLOS One" we wanted to provide a scientific frame of reference to identify the lesser evil and make targeted recommendations."However, regardless of the conservation strategy, these objectives required the participation of both private landowners and local communities.
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February 2, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180202112629.htm
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Nano-switches in the cell
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A team with researchers from Freiburg discovered a new mechanism for the regulation of protein synthesis.
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Mitochondria, best known for their role as cellular power plants, perform numerous vital tasks in the cell. During cell respiration, reactive oxygen species can be formed in mitochondria. If these are present in excess, their high reactivity leads to irreparable damage to important cellular components. This so-called oxidative stress is assumed to play a causal role in many diseases and in ageing processes. In low concentrations, however, reactive oxygen species can also act as important second messengers in the cell. Here, specific, so-called redox-active thiols in distinct proteins are modified. This type of oxidative modification is reversible and, like a nano-switch, can regulate the function of a protein.A German-Polish research team led by Prof. Dr. Bettina Warscheid from the University of Freiburg and Prof. Dr. Agnieszka Chacinska from the Centre of New Technologies in Warsaw/Poland has discovered a new mechanism that enables mitochondria with impaired redox balance to regulate the synthesis of new proteins in the cytoplasm. The mitochondria use reactive oxygen species as signal to slow down the cellular protein synthesis machinery. The study was published in the current issue of the scientific journal Using quantitative mass spectrometry, Dr. Ida Suppanz from Warscheid's research group first determined the redox state of thiols in thousands of proteins of the baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. She discovered so far unknown redox-active thiols in components of the ribosomes at which new proteins are synthesized.Dr. Ulrike Topf from Chacinska's group observed that increased levels of reactive oxygen species inhibit protein synthesis. Using biochemical and cell biological methods, she showed that damaged mitochondria can signal their metabolic state to the protein synthesis machinery via reactive oxygen species and, thereby, slow down cellular protein synthesis. It is assumed that the temporary reduction of the protein synthesis rate under oxidative stress has a positive effect on the survival of the cells as it is believed to help to restore cellular homeostasis. This also prevents the cell from synthesizing proteins that cannot be taken up by damaged mitochondria, which, as a consequence, accumulate in the cytoplasm and thus need to be degraded. Researches of Warscheid's and Chacinska's teams explained how the cell reacts to such a protein accumulation in 2015 in the journal
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February 1, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180201085806.htm
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Rare ichthyosaur is only second known example
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A rare 200 million-year-old ichthyosaur specimen has been discovered in a private collection 22 years after it was originally found.
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The fossil is only the second example of Ichthyosaurs have recently been in the limelight as the focus of BBC One documentary, 'Attenborough and the Sea Dragon'. They were a type of sea-going reptile that lived during the time of the dinosaurs. Their fossils are plentiful in the UK and in recent years Lomax has described five different species of the prehistoric reptile.In 2016, Lomax described an ichthyosaur skeleton that he had examined in the collections of Leicester's New Walk Museum and Art Gallery. He spotted several unusual features of the bones and determined that the features were unique and represented a new species, which he called Wahlisaurus massarae, in honour of two of his colleagues and mentors: Bill Wahl and Prof. Judy Massare.He said: "When In this new study, Lomax teamed up with Dr Mark Evans, palaeontologist and curator at the New Walk Museum, Leicester, and fossil collector, Simon Carpenter, of Somerset. The study focuses on a specimen Dean identified in Simon's collection, which is an almost complete coracoid bone (part of the pectoral girdle) that has exactly the same unique features of the same bone in Wahlisaurus. The specimen was originally collected in 1996, in a quarry in northern Somerset. Once the specimen's rarity was realised, Simon immediately donated it to Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.Lomax added: "You can only imagine my sheer excitement to find a specimen of The new discovery is from a time known as the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, right after a world-wide mass extinction. For these reasons, the team have been unable to determine exactly whether the ichthyosaur was latest Triassic or earliest Jurassic in age, although it is roughly 200 million-year-old.As part of the study, Dr Evans cleaned the bones and removed additional rock from the first specimen. This assisted in a detailed re-examination of the original skull, which led to the discovery of additional bones. This has provided a better understanding of the skull structure."The discovery of the new specimen in a private collection helps to recognise the important contribution of dedicated and responsible fossil collectors. I am especially grateful to Simon for donating the specimen and collecting all of the data available with the specimen when he found it." Added Lomax.
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February 1, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180201085800.htm
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The disappearance of common species
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Together with their colleagues from the Senckenberg Nature Research Society, scientists of the Technical University of Munich (TUM) were able to show that currently widespread insects are threatened with a serious decline in species diversity in the near future. The research team lists the fragmentation of habitats and the intensification of agriculture as reasons for the decline of these "generalists." According to the study, published today in the scientific journal
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The number of insects continues to decrease -- in some regions, a dramatic decline by up to 75 percent has been recorded in recent decades. "Until now, we assumed that it is primarily the specialists among the insects, i.e., animals that depend on a specific habitat, that are threatened with extinction," explains Professor Dr. Thomas Schmitt, director of the Senckenberg German Entomological Institute in Müncheberg, and he continues, "In our recent study, we were able to show that even so-called "ubiquitous species" will be facing massive threats in the future."In its study, the team of scientists explains that species with low habitat requirements depend on the exchange between different populations. "Our studies clearly show that widespread species have a much more diverse intraspecific gene pool than species that are adapted to a specific habitat," explains Dr. Jan Christian Habel of the Technical University in Munich, and he continues, "Once these animals -- due to the fragmentation of their habitats -- lose the opportunity to maintain this genetic diversity by means of exchange, they will no longer be able to adapt to changing environmental conditions in the future."The insect researchers from Munich and Müncheberg refer to a "temporal shift in the potential causes for the decline of species." Initially, it is primarily those insects that specialize in a particular ecosystem, e.g., the Mountain Apollo ("In terms of practical nature conservation, these results signify that in the future it will no longer be sufficient to preserve small, isolated reserves -- while these benefit specialized species with a simple genetic structure, the bulk of species that depend on an exchange between local populations will lose out in the medium to long term," predicts Schmitt, and he adds in closing, "This will lead to a further decline of numerous insect species -- with dramatic consequences for entire food webs and ecosystems."
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January 31, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180131133335.htm
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A glimpse in the flora of Southeast Asia puts a spotlight on its conservation
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Covering only three percent of Earth's total land area, four overlapping biodiversity hotspots in South East China -- Indo-Burma, Philippines, Sundaland and Wallacea -- are estimated to be the home of the astonishing 20 to 25 % of higher plant species in the area. While offering an insight into this extraordinary flora, a new special issue published in the open access journal
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Entitled "Plant diversity in Southeast Asia" the special issue hosts twelve articles devoted to the cause of promoting awareness the biodiversity richness of the region while raising concerns on its conservation."With this collective effort we showcase taxonomic discoveries as a route to bridging the gap between what we currently know and what is actually out there in terms of biological diversity,"explains special issue editor and contributing author Prof Xiao-Hua Jin, Southeast Asia Biodiversity Research Institute (SEABRI), Chinese Academy of Sciences. "Understanding biodiversity is increasingly crucial for its conservation and towards achieving sustainable development in the shadow of climate change and the growth of economy and population."In their big venture, Dr Jin and his co-editors and authors were financially supported the Chinese Academy of Sciences through the SEABRI Institute, a venture established in 2014 with the specific task to help understanding and conserving the biodiversity in Southeast Asia.Due to its notable botanical diversity Southeast Asia has long been an area of interest for biological surveys and scientific research. Despite the extensive effort to date, however, the species richness of the region remains by far underestimated. In fact, many species might become extinct before we even know that they existed in Southeast Asia."Although it will be an unquestionably daunting task, it is extremely urgent to investigate, understand and conserve our biota," explains Prof Xiao-Hua Jin.Within the twelve articles hosted in the new special issue, readers may learn more about: two new species of Oreocharis (Gesneriaceae) and a new species of Didymocarpus (Gesneriaceae) from Vietnam, a new species of Aristolochia (Aristolochiaceae), a new species of Dendrobium (Orchidaceae), a new species of Gastrodia (Orchidaceae), a new species of Hedychium (Zingiberaceae) and two new species of Trivalvaria (Annonaceae) from Northern Myanmar, a new species of Primulina (Gesneriaceae) from southwest China and seven species of Begonia (Begoniaceae) from Northern Vietnam and Southern China.Find the full special issue here:
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January 31, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180131095645.htm
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New parasitoid wasp likely uses unique saw-like spines to break out of its host body
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About the size of a sesame seed, a new species of wasp from Costa Rica, named Dendrocerus scutellaris, has elaborate branched antennae that could be used for finding mates. Or hosts.
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The new insect is described by PhD candidate Carolyn Trietsch, Dr. István Mikó and Dr. Andrew Deans of the Frost Entomological Museum at Penn State, USA, together with Dr. David Notton of the Natural History Museum in London, UK. Their study is published in the open access The wasp is a parasitoid, meaning that its larvae feed on a live host insect. There are two types of parasitoids: ectoparasitoids, which lay their eggs on or near the host, so that the hatchling larvae can attach to and feed on the insect from the outside; and endoparasitoids, which lay their eggs directly inside the host, so that the larvae can eat them from the inside out.Unfortunately, to puzzle out the new wasp's lifestyle, the researchers could only rely on specimens collected back in 1985, which had spent the past few decades stored in the collections of the Natural History Museum of London before being loaned to the Frost Museum at Penn State for research.What can you learn about a wasp's lifestyle from specimens that are over 30 years old? Even though the new species has never been observed in the wild, researchers managed to learn a lot by looking at the wasps' morphology, concluding that the species is likely an endoparasitoid.The larva of an endoparasitoid wasp needs a safe place to develop and mature, so when it is done feeding on its host, it may stay inside the host's body where it can develop undisturbed. Once it is fully grown, the adult wasp either chews or pushes its way out, killing the host if it isn't already dead.Unlike its close relatives, the new species does not have pointed mandibles for chewing. Instead, it has a series of spines along its back. While the wasp is emerging, it may rub these spines against the host and use them like a saw to cut open the body. Once emerged, it flies off to mate and continue the cycle."While their lives may sound gruesome, parasitoid wasps are harmless to humans and can even be helpful," explain the scientists. "Depending on the host they parasitize, parasitoids can benefit agriculture by controlling pest insects like aphids that damage crops."It is currently unknown what the new species feeds upon, but naming the species and bringing it to attention is the first step in learning more about it.
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January 31, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180131085845.htm
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UK chalk-stream salmon genetically unique
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Salmon from the chalk streams of southern England are genetically unique, researchers have discovered.
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The fish are classified as Atlantic salmon (The researchers studied five chalk streams in Hampshire and Dorset -- habitats they said were under "massive pressure" from human activity.Classifying chalk-stream salmon as a separate sub-species could make it easier to protect them."Our study provides evidence of the genetic distinctiveness of chalk-stream Atlantic salmon in southern England," said Dr Jamie Stevens, of the University of Exeter."They are as different from their non-chalk cousins as the salmon of the Baltic are, and people have suggested the Baltic fish should be classified as a sub-species."While we found distinct differences between chalk and non-chalk salmon, we found little genetic differentiation within chalk-stream populations."Chalk streams -- which originate in chalk hills and are generally wide and shallow with clear water -- are fed by underground aquifers and have steadier flow rates and more stable temperatures than most other rivers, and are less acidic.Of the 161 rivers classified as chalk streams by the Environment Agency, only five contain significant populations of salmon. These -- the Frome, Piddle, Avon, Test and Itchen -- were the focus of this study.Chalk-stream salmon -- like other salmon -- spend long periods at sea and swim hundreds of miles, but return to breed.Some salmon return to the exact river where they were born, but Dr Stevens said genetic evidence suggested that may not be the case for chalk-stream salmon."We found evidence of quite a bit of mixing of genes between the rivers we studied," he said."Rather than coming back to a specific river, they may just home to the chalk rivers generally."We can't be sure of that, but the level of similarity suggests that there's ongoing gene flow between these rivers."Dr Rasmus Lauridsen, of the Game and Wildlife Conservation Trust, said: "Fish research at the Trust is centred around the river lab at East Stoke, Dorset, where we have been monitoring Atlantic salmon numbers in the River Frome since 1973."We know that chalk streams are very productive and juvenile salmon in these rivers generally migrate to sea after just one year, whereas young salmon in other river types typically leave freshwater at 2-3 years."Chalk-stream salmon are adapted to fast freshwater growth and it is unlikely that they could be replaced if anthropogenic stressors were to drive them to local extinction."So should chalk-stream salmon be classified as a sub-species?Dr Stevens says yes."They certainly fit the criteria for being a sub-species -- they are a genetically unique group with a well-defined distribution, associated with a distinctive habitat," he said."About 85 per cent of the world's chalk streams are in the UK, and the fish we studied are in an area of southern Britain that's under massive pressure from human activity."These streams begin in agricultural areas, which brings a threat from pollution, and they pass through major urban areas to reach the sea around places such as Southampton, Portsmouth and Poole."This is a precarious position for these salmon, and classifying them as a sub-species could aid efforts to protect them."
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New Species
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January 30, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180130123754.htm
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Unusual properties within the grass genus Diplachne
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The grass genus
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Occuring widely on all continents except Antarctica, Even more intriguing is the discovery of a German research team from the 1980s, which discovered that some populations from southern Asia harbor a nitrogen-fixing bacterial species, which when described was new to science."The combination of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and high levels of salinity tolerance is unknown in others grasses, at least that I am aware of," explains Snow."The high tolerance for growing in saline soils suggests the plants may have untapped potential for the reclamation of salinized agricultural soils, which is more and more problematic for some producers."In significant contrast, the second species "I spent two long and hot days in a boat in the Okavango Delta in Botswana in 1996 looking for this elusive plant, but regrettably without success," comments Snow on his attempt to encounter Snow's colleagues at the Smithsonian Insitution, Drs. Paul Peterson and Konstantin Romaschenko , included a molecular phylogenetic analysis of 21 individuals of Diplachne, which indicated that while the genus is monophyletic, some accessions of the four subspecies of
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New Species
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January 29, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180129104650.htm
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Untangling the complex taxonomic history of a Neotropical liana genus
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While untangling the complex taxonomy of
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How do you separate one species from another? Having remained a major challenge in biology as a whole, species delimitation becomes a rather daunting task when it comes to tropical plant groups, where insights on biology, morphology and distribution are often scarce.For Francisco and Lohmann it took three field expeditions to different states of the Brazilian Amazon, combined with deep morphological and molecular studies, to set straight uncertainties in the complex taxonomic history of Pachyptera lianas."We used an integrative approach, which means we combined data from different sources to further understand the taxonomy, evolutionary history and biogeography of Amazonian lianas," explains Ms. Jéssica Francisco. "We also used different analytical approaches to clearly delimit species and further understand their origin, evolution and diversification history," she says.For the authors, the results from this multi-approach effort amounted to recognizing five well-delimited species in the genus, while also describing a previously undiscovered species.""Lianas are important members of tropical forests, constituting ca. 25% of their species diversity and contributing up to 40% of leaf productivity. Accurate species recognition and enhanced scientific understanding of species diversity is critical for accurately establishing conservation priorities," says Dr. Lúcia Lohmann.
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January 26, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180126163823.htm
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Entomologist discovers millipede that comes in more color combinations than any other
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The new millipede that Paul Marek discovered is as pretty as it is dangerous.
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The thumb-sized millipede that crawls around the forest floor of Southwest Virginia's Cumberland Mountains has more color combinations than any other millipede discovered.Apheloria polychroma, as the millipede is known, also has an enviable trait in the animal world -- it's covered in cyanide, ensuring any bird that snacks on the colorful but lethal invertebrate won't do it a second time. Lots of other millipedes that don't have as much toxic defense mimic Apheloria polychroma's coloring in hopes of avoiding becoming another link in the food chain.This is the 10th species that Marek, an assistant professor in the Virginia Tech College of Agriculture and Life Sciences' Department of Entomology, has discovered and named in recent years. Apheloria polychroma was named for its rainbow of colors and was described by Marek; Jackson Means, a graduate student from Keswick, Virginia; and Derek Hennen, a graduate student from Little Hocking, Ohio. Marek runs the only millipede lab in the United States.The team's findings were recently published in the journal While Marek's work is focused on small things, his research helps tell the larger story of the quickly changing natural world. By documenting the many living organisms of the planet, he is helping avoid anonymous extinction -- a process in which a species goes extinct before its existence, role in the ecosystem, or potential benefit to humanity is known."It is imperative to describe and catalog these species so that we know what role they play in the ecosystem -- and what impact we are having on them," said Marek. "This region is ripe with biodiversity and is an excellent living laboratory to do this work."The millipedes that copy Apheloria polychroma use what is called Mullerian mimicry, where different species converge on a shared aposematic (warning signal) to defend themselves against a common predator. The more frequently predators encounter what appears to be the same brightly colored unpalatable millipede and memorize its warning colors, the better the collective advertisement of their noxiousness.In addition to the millipede's colorful exoskeleton, it also serves an important role in the ecosystem as a decomposer by breaking down decaying leaves, wood, and other vegetation to unlock and recycle their nutrients for future generations of forest life.In recent years, Marek also has had a tarantula named for him, explored the origins of bioluminescence, and discovered the leggiest creature on Earth.
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New Species
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January 26, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180126085440.htm
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Paleontology: The eleventh Archaeopteryx
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Researchers from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet (LMU) in Munich report the first description of the geologically oldest fossil securely attributable to the genus
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Some 150 million years ago in what is now Northern Bavaria, "Specimens of The new specimen is the 12th fossil to be attributed to the genus. However, in a study published in the online journal Moreover, the investigation of the 11th specimen demonstrates that the known specimens span a remarkable range of anatomical variation. Potential explanations for the broad spectrum of variation extend from intraspecific developmental polymorphism to evolutionary differentiation, i.e., the possibility that the fossil material so far recovered represents more than one species. "The high degree of variation in the teeth is particularly striking -- none of the specimens shows the same pattern of dentition as any other, which could reflect differences in diet," Rauhut points out. "This is very reminiscent of the famous case of Darwin's finches on the Galapagos, which show remarkable variation in their beak shapes. It is even conceivable that this primeval bird genus might, in a similar fashion, have diversified into several specialized forms on the islands of the Solnhofener Archipelago. In that case, the
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New Species
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January 25, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180125135526.htm
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Ecologist unearths the foothill yellow-legged frog's past in order to inform its future
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Once abundant in Southern California, the foothill yellow-legged frog inexplicably vanished from the region sometime between the late 1960s and early 1970s. The reasons behind its rapid extinction have been an ecological mystery.
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Environmental scientist Andrea Adams set out to crack the case. While pursuing her Ph.D. at UC Santa Barbara, she spent six and a half years reconstructing the missing amphibian's story in an attempt to find out why it disappeared. Her dissertation -- Adams earned her doctorate in 2017 -- explored the importance of discovering a species' past to inform its future. Now, a paper summarizing her findings about Rana boylii appears in the journal "As species disappearances from unknown causes go, this one occurred at breakneck speed," said Adams, now a lecturer in UCSB's Environmental Studies Program. "The global trend of amphibian declines points to habitat loss, ultraviolet radiation and pesticides as potential culprits, yet most of these act gradually, slowly chipping away at populations over time. One of the only threats that can cause rapid extirpation -- like that of Rana boylii in Southern California -- is disease."Chytridiomycosis -- caused by the fungal pathogen As a first step, Adams sampled more than 1,300 historical, archived amphibian specimens from natural history museums. Then she tested an improved protocol to better detect Bd DNA in those specimens. In addition, she looked for Bd DNA in amphibian species that occurred in the Southern California locations common to foothill yellow-legged frogs before, during and after their decline.Adams also interviewed people who visited Southern California streams before the foothill yellow-legged frog disappeared. "The information I sought didn't exist anywhere but in people's memories and sometimes in field notes stashed away in their garages," she explained. "I used that archived material to determine when foothill yellow-legged frogs were observed and how their population size diminished through time."Although Bd arrived in the region long before the foothill yellow-legged frog began to decline, Adams found that the pathogen widely advanced as the frogs began to disappear. Many factors could have contributed to the spread: the pressure of a rapidly expanding metropolitan region; increased recreational use of streams; roads extending deeper into natural areas; and the appearance of exotic species. Take the American bullfrog as an example. Brought to Topanga Canyon in big numbers in the early 1900s, the species today is widespread in California and known to harbor and spread Bd via international amphibian trade."When I overlaid the historical information with the incidence and prevalence of the chytrid fungus, I found that when the foothill yellow-legged frog started to go extinct corresponded to a spike in the spread of the pathogen in Southern California," Adams said."Because this is a retrospective study, we can't say for certain that amphibian chytrid fungus is the cause," said co-author Cherie Briggs, a professor in UCSB's Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology. "However, Andrea's doctoral thesis and this paper provide sound supporting evidence for this hypothesis."
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January 25, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180125101303.htm
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Two new snout moth genera and three new species discovered in southern China
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New members have joined the ranks of the snout moths -- one of the largest groups within the insect order known formally as Lepidoptera, comprising all moths and butterflies.
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Recently, taxonomists Dr. Mingqiang Wang, Dr. Fuqiang Chen, Prof. Chaodong Zhu and Prof. Chunsheng Wu of the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences described two genera and three species previously unknown to science discovered in southern China.Their study is published in the open access journal Having named one of the two new genera The second new genus, named In conclusion, the authors note that given the latitude they discovered all of the studied moths, it is highly likely that more species belonging to the newly described genera are pending discovery in the adjacent countries -- especially India.
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New Species
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January 24, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180124100604.htm
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New 'big-armed fly' species named after former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger
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New species can be named for all types of attributes, but Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County entomologist Brian Brown knew exactly what name to give a bizarre new fly species he discovered in the Brazilian Amazon.
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"As soon as I saw those bulging legs, I knew I had to name this one after Arnold," says Brown. "Not only is he a major cultural icon and an important person in the political realm, his autobiography gave me some hope that I could improve my body as a skinny teenager." For these reasons, Brown says, the former governor deserves to have the new fly named in his honor.His research article is published in the open access The fly is impressive in other ways, Brown explains. "It is known only from one female specimen that we almost overlooked because it is so incredibly small."In fact, it is the world's smallest known fly, according to Brown, who should know, since he had previously described what was formerly the world's smallest fly, at 0.400 mm in body length. The new fly, named However, unlike the enlarged forelegs that prompted the naming, the mid- and hind legs appear to be highly reduced, and the wings reduced to tiny stubs.Even though the fly has not been observed in the wild, Brown concludes that it is clearly a parasitoid, probably of ants or termites, based on its pointed, sharp ovipositor. He further speculates that these flies probably grab onto the hosts and "hold on for dear life" until they reach a nest or colony where they can parasitize their victims more effectively.Brown has had considerable success finding new species of tiny flies, which he says are "the continuing frontier for insect discovery."Some of the more obvious, larger insects might have already been described, but by looking at smaller specimens, especially from remote, tropical sites, the entomologist finds that almost everything is new.Even in his home city of Los Angeles, Brown and collaborators found that almost half of the phorid flies were previously unknown.For example, it was last year that they finally figured why a secretive fly had been observed around mushrooms with no clear explanation for nearly 30 years. The revelation occurred when L.A. Bed & Breakfast owners Patsy Carter and Lisa Carter-Davis decided to alert entomologists about a phenomenon happening in their yard.Back in 2016, Brian and his team described at once a total of twelve scuttle fly species new to science after 'field' trips in the backyards of houses around the city of angels.
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New Species
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January 24, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180124092459.htm
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Is species richness increasing? Insight into an intense ecological debate
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Scientists are debating whether and why it appears that the number of species at sites worldwide is holding steady (even increasing at many), as biodiversity declines globally.
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Could biodiversity be remaining steady at locations around the world, even as species go extinct and biodiversity declines globally? This question has created a stir among conservation biologists and ecologists that has lasted for 15 years. New insights into the debate are critically reviewed in an editorial by the editors of the international scientific journal Biological Conservation, and a separate article in the same journal. The evidence affects the core tenets of conservation biology: How do humans influence biodiversity? And how do we set and measure conservation goals?Many recent ecological studies have found the surprising result that the number of species (i.e., species richness) at sites around the world has remained stable on average or is even increasing. These sites include wide range of species and habitats-plants and animals; and forests, grasslands, freshwaters, and oceans."These findings highlight the need for conservation biologists to avoid oversimplification when making the case for conservation and selecting indicators of success," says Dr. Richard Primack, lead author of the editorial and an editor at Biological Conservation. "'More species is good' is a seductively straightforward and attractive argument. However, it ignores scale (biodiversity can increase locally, but decline globally), it ignores ecological processes and interactions, and it ignores many other aspects of biodiversity-such as changes in ecosystem services and loss of genetic variation-less obvious to non-biologists. It also misses the ethical, cultural, and aesthetic values of certain species and ecological communities, such as monarch butterflies and redwood forests. These aspects of biodiversity can still be damaged or lost, even as species richness remains steady or increases."Some ecologists argue that the trends should not be considered as true "global" patterns of changes in local biodiversity. The reason is that the studies exclude sites that were paved, turned to farmland, or recovering from past disturbance (e.g., abandoned farmland returning to forests), and include sites that are not evenly distributed around the world. These ecologists argue that a fair analysis would conclude that biodiversity is generally declining both globally and locally.Still, at a large number of locations the number of species is holding steady or increasing, despite the fact that hundreds of birds, mammals, and other species have already gone extinct around the world, and thousands more are declining and threatened with extinction. It seems that, while human influence is leading to the loss of many native species from specific locations, many of those lost species are "replaced" by native or non-native species that arrive and become established. In some places, such as New Zealand and Hawaii, the influx of nonnative species is so great that they have many more species now than they did 200 years ago. However, these new species do not necessarily replace the ecological functions or niches that the lost native species filled."Debates like this one help us identify and address key questions and problems in conservation biology, and help us generate the shared understanding necessary to advance the field and achieve conservation goals on the ground.. Supporting these scientific discussions is a key part of the mission of Biological Conservation," says Dr. Vincent Devictor, Editor-in-Chief at the journal.
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New Species
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January 24, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180124085548.htm
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Saving key branches of shark and ray tree of life
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To shine light on and conserve rare shark, ray, and chimaera species (chondrichthyans), SFU researchers have developed a fully-resolved family tree and ranked every species according to the unique evolutionary history they account for.
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"While we've all heard of white sharks and manta rays, how many of us have heard of the Colclough's shark or the sharkray?" asks Christopher Mull, an SFU postdoctoral fellow and one of the study's lead authors. "Most shark and ray species are underappreciated because they aren't featured in the popular media, but they often play important biological, sociological, or economic roles and deserve conservation attention."By quantifying how much unique evolutionary history a species accounts for (also known as their evolutionary distinctness), the researchers discovered that the extinction of a single shark or ray species would prune an average of 26 million years of distinct evolutionary history from the shark and ray tree of life. That's twice the amount for an average mammal and more than four times that for an average bird."We were excited to see that the most evolutionarily distinct shark and ray species included a diversity of forms and functions," says SFU biological sciences professor Nick Dulvy, a senior author of the study. "Everything from deep-water and filter-feeding sharks to electric rays and sawfish rose to the top as being particularly evolutionarily distinct."Taking this a step further to better focus efforts in marine conservation, the authors combined evolutionary distinctness with range maps to understand how shark and ray evolutionary history is distributed throughout the oceans. The researchers identified five priority hotspots for shark and ray conservation:(1) southwest Atlantic Ocean,(2) western Africa,(3) southwest Indian Ocean,(4) northwest Pacific Ocean and(5) southwest Pacific Ocean.With this information, the Zoological Society of London will soon launch an EDGE (evolutionary distinct & globally endangered) sharks conservation initiative under the EDGE of Existence programme. It will help build local expertise and capacity for the conservation of threatened evolutionarily distinct sharks and rays."Our main concern was to produce a tool that conservation practitioners will actually use," says SFU biodiversity professor Arne Mooers, and a senior author. "The goal is to help conserve as much of the Tree of Life as possible."Chondrichthyans (sharks, rays, and chimaeras) are composed of 1,192 species and account for 36.8 billion years of unique evolutionary history.One quarter of sharks and ray (n = 242) species are imperiled, primarily due to overfishing.The loss of a single species to extinction would prune 26 million years of unique evolutionary history from the shark and ray tree of life.The research is funded by Save Our Seas Foundation.
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New Species
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January 23, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180123112604.htm
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Scientists suggest way to predict the behavior of invasive weeds
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Is it possible to predict which nonnative plant species will become invasive weeds and when? According to research featured in the journal
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Researchers say invasive species generally follow a three-phase development curve -- from lag to expansion to plateau. The length and rapidity of the expansion phase varies across species and determines how aggressively a plant spreads."Understanding the source of this variation can help us predict which nonnative species become invasive," says Pedro M. Antunes, who co-authored of the paper with Dr. Brandon Schamp, both of Algoma University in Ontario, Canada. "The key is to take a best practices-based approach to gathering and comparing data about past invaders, their traits and preferred habitats."Examples of the best practices the research team recommends:"As our knowledge increases, we can make better-informed predictions about the likelihood of particular species becoming invasive and the timeline they will travel as they do so," Antunes says. "We then can take advantage of the lag time before the plant population expands to intervene with appropriate management controls."
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New Species
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January 22, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180122110829.htm
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A race against pine: Wood-boring wasp in North America threatened by a Eurasian invader
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Invasive species have diverse impacts in different locations, including biodiversity loss, as a result of native species being outcompeted for similar resources. A U.S. research team, led by Dr. Ann Hajek, Cornell University, studied the case of an aggressive Eurasian woodwasp that has recently established in North America and poses a threat to a native species. Their study is published in the open-access journal
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Most woodwasps play an essential part in the forest ecosystem, as they decompose wood, preferring dying or felled trees. They do so by laying their eggs in the wood underneath the tree bark. Curiously, the wasps also deposit a symbiotic fungus and venom that shuts down the tree's defenses. As the tree weakens, the fungal infestation begins and the the tree starts to rot. When the eggs hatch, the larvae feed on the rotten wood before they emerge. This relationship is called obligate since the survival of the wasp is impossible without the fungal infestation.Originating from Eurasia, the presence of the invasive species is dangerous because it can kill healthier pines. It has long been established in the southern hemisphere causing economic issues due to its attacks on pines. While pines have been introduced to that part of the world, they are native to North America, where the invasive wasp could be far more devastating.Now that the invasive woodwasp has already been identified in the States, the scientists seek to find a way to protect its frail competitor, reporting a rapid decline in the North American species."We would often observe both species emerging from the same infested pine trees, but the ratios changed with time," explains Dr. Ann Hajek."Shortly after the invasive colonizes an area, the native wasps emerging from the trees would equal the invasive. However, a few years later, the natives started to get fewer and fewer."It turned out that the Eurasian woodwasp has larger venom glands and produces more eggs, thanks to its greater body size. Furthermore, it emerges earlier than the North American species, so that it can find and colonize the most suitable trees first. By the time the native species lays its eggs, the authors speculate, most of the preferred trees are already occupied by the invasive, leaving a reduced supply of habitat for the newcomer's larvae."Woodwasps are difficult to study and their biologies are generally poorly understood," note the authors. "While the native species appears to be outcompeted from pines that both species prefer, it is possible that populations of the native can be sustained in trees less desirable to the invasive or unavailable during the time and place that the invasive is present."The scientists call for additional research on the native woodwasp in southeastern pine forests in USA, before the invaders spread to that area with extensive pine forests.
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New Species
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January 19, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180119091112.htm
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A survival lesson from bats: Eating variety keeps species multiplying
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Diet is an important factor influencing the survival and evolution of all species. Many studies have shown that when species evolve from being a predator or insectivore to being a vegetarian, the rate at which new species arise increases. But a new study published in
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Co-author Liliana Dávalos, PhD, a Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution, and colleagues examined the rate at which new species arise, as well as the rate of change for diet across the evolutionary history of more than a hundred species of these bats. They found that adding plants to the diet increased rates of new species formation. The fastest rates of species formation corresponded to lineages that fed mostly -- but not exclusively on plant products -- or fed on many different types of products such a fruit, nectar and pollen.Conversely, when the bats specialized on a single plant product new species formation was decreased."These bats illustrate that being a generalist herbivore or a modestly insectivorous omnivore is a boon, perhaps because it is a form of insurance against erratic or unpredictable plant blooming or fruiting schedules," said Dávalos.The survival lesson: Omnivory that includes a wide variety of plant materials improves chances for survival and evolution.The research for this study was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.
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New Species
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January 18, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180118084258.htm
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Hybridization can give rise to different genome combinations
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Researchers have for the first time determined that hybridization between two bird species can give rise to several novel and fully functional hybrid genomic combinations. This could potentially be because hybrid species emerged through independent hybridisation events between the same parent species on different islands.
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Swedish and Norwegian researchers have studied island populations of a hybrid species, the Italian sparrow (Passer italiae) from Crete, Corsica, Sicily and Malta. The researchers find that Italian sparrow populations from different islands probably result from independent hybridization events between their parent species, the house sparrow and Spanish sparrow."The populations on the islands have very different genetic compositions. This is consistent with independent hybridisation events between the parent species. We have demonstrated that hybridisation between the same parent species can lead to great variation within a new hybrid species," says Anna Runemark, biologist at Lund University in Sweden.The researchers have also discovered limitations to which genetic combinations that work together. The Italian sparrow always inherits certain genes from the house sparrow, regardless of whether the house or Spanish sparrow contributes the majority of genes to the hybrid. These house sparrow genes are likely required to form a functional hybrid. Among the genes that Italian sparrows always inherit from the house sparrow are those that repair DNA. These gene classes are likely to give rise to reproductive isolation between species, and may thus be important when new species are formed."Genes that are always inherited from the house sparrow are probably important in order for the hybrid to survive and reproduce. Our discovery shows that there are limitations to which combinations of genes work together," says Anna Runemark, continuing:"In practice, it means that we have identified genes that are important for speciation."Understanding the potential outcomes of hybridization helps predict possible consequences when species move to new geographic areas where they meet and mate with close relatives; for example, when species move increasingly farther north due to a warmer climate.
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New Species
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January 17, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117085740.htm
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Genetic drift caught in action in invasive birds
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Studies of island bird populations have taught us a lot about evolution, but it's hard to catch birds in the act of naturally colonizing new islands. Instead, a new study from
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Japanese Bush-Warblers were introduced to Oahu in 1929 and have since become established on all the main islands of Hawaii, providing a unique opportunity to follow post-invasion evolution on a known, recent timescale. Northern Arizona University's Jeffrey Foster and his colleagues took blood and muscle samples from 147 bush-warblers living on five islands between 2003 and 2005. Their results indicate genetic drift is occurring -- Oahu's birds have higher genetic diversity than those on other islands, whose populations were founded by smaller groups of individuals, just as population genetic theory predicts. Kauai bush-warblers, however, appear to be on a distinct genetic trajectory from those on other islands. Kauai is three times as far from Oahu as the closest other islands, and appears to have received a unique subset of the overall genetic diversity found elsewhere, but it remains to be seen whether the trend on Kauai will continue in the future or if continued dispersal of birds among islands will blur these differences. "This study nicely showed genetic divergence for a very short period using the artificially introduced Japanese Bush-Warblers," according to Shoji Hamao of Japan's National Museum of Nature and Science, an expert on the species."I got the idea for bush-warblers as a study system due to the challenges associated with my previous work on native Hawaiian birds," says Foster. "Most of the native bird species I had worked on were exceedingly rare -- several of them were endangered species, in fact -- so focusing a new project on species in decline or with low numbers was a risky proposition. However, many of the introduced birds are quite common and one species, the Japanese Bush-Warbler, caught my attention with its loud song."Bush-Warblers first arrived on the Big Island when I was living there in the 1990s. The idea that one could study this invasion in progress totally blew my mind. The genetic findings largely followed expectations, such as seeing the most genetic diversity on the island where the birds were introduced and less elsewhere. Birds on Kauai, the island just west of Oahu, appear to be more distinct than those birds on islands east of Oahu, suggesting that over time birds on the respective islands may continue to diverge genetically." But, Foster adds, many questions remain to be answered. "How much are the birds still flying between islands and potentially mixing any genetic signals of differentiation? Why did it take 50 years for the bush-warblers to colonize other islands after Oahu? How have their vocalizations changed after colonization due to new environments or random chance? We still don't know."
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January 17, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117085737.htm
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Timing of spring birdsong provides climate insights
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Climate change has scientists worried that birds' annual migration and reproduction will be thrown out of sync with the seasons. Because birds' songs are correlated with their breeding behavior and are easily identifiable to species, monitoring birdsong can be a good way to keep tabs on this possibility, and a new study from
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The California Department of Fish and Wildlife Brett Furnas and William Jessup University's Michael McGrann analyzed data from two bird survey programs from California's Klamath Mountains and Southern Cascades, both of which used automated recorders to monitor bird sounds between 2009 and 2011. In addition to providing the first comprehensive assessment of songbird occupancy over a 40,000 square kilometer region of northern California, they were able to identify the precise dates of peak vocal activity for eight songbird species, and their work shows that this will be a feasible method to track advances in the timing of vocal activity over the coming decades. Species characterized by strong single peaks in vocal activity already tended to reach those peaks later than other species, perhaps because birds with tightly constrained timing are less able to adapt to changing climatic conditions."Climate change is disrupting songbird populations, distributions, and breeding behaviors in our mountain ecosystems. Mountains are particularly sensitive because temperature and precipitation interact in complex ways on mountains," says McGrann. "If Neotropical migrants are unable to adjust their breeding behaviors, then there may be a mismatch in the timing of raising their young to the peak availability in food resources, namely insects. Our technique should allow us to track shifts in elevation, changes in the state of the population, and changes in breeding behaviors in response to climate change over the next ten to twenty years.""Furnas and McGrann provide a textbook example of how to detect differences in the timing of nesting among bird species using information on the peak date of singing derived from surveys and automated recorders," according to UC Berkeley's Steve Beissinger, an expert on avian phenology who was not involved in the study. "Their results support recent findings of a five to twelve day shift forward in the timing of peak singing by California birds in the nearby Sierra Nevada and coastal ranges in response to climate change."
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January 16, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180116111116.htm
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Named after Stanley Kubrick, a new species of frog is a 'clockwork orange' of nature
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Two new treefrog species were discovered in the Amazon Basin of Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil. Both had been previously misidentified as another superficially identical species.
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Curiously, one of them received a name translating to 'demon' or 'devil'. The second one was named in honor of famous American filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, because of his masterpiece A Clockwork Orange.Having conducted analyses of genetic, morphologic, and bioacoustic data, scientists C. Daniel Rivadeneira, Dr. Pablo J. Venegas, and Dr. Santiago R. Ron concluded that the amphibians represented two previously unknown species that used to go by the name of the Sarayacu treefrog (Dendropsophus parviceps).As a result of this research collaboration between Ecuador's Catholic University (PUCE) and Peru's Centro de Ornitología y Biodiversidad (CORBIDI), the treefrogs were recently described as new to science in the open access journal The scientists remind that, back in 1972, when Anthony Burgess explained the title of his famous novel A Clockwork Orange, he said: "I've implied the junction of the organic, the lively, the sweet -- in other words, life, the orange -- and the mechanical, the cold, the disciplined (...)""Without knowing, he was also giving a good metaphor to describe ecosystems," comment the researchers. "Nature works as the interplay between life and its cold, mechanical, and disciplined physical matrix."Furthermore, both new frogs, scientifically listed as On the other hand, the species name kamagarini refers to 'demon' or 'devil', as per its translation from the Matsigenka language spoken in southeastern Peru. One of the characteristic features of the new species Amphibians are important pieces in ecosystems as secondary consumers in food chains. They also play a significant role in decomposition and nutrient cycling.Stanley Kubrick -- arguably one of the most brilliant and influential film directors of all time -- left an immemorial legacy in cinema. His masterpiece, A Clockwork Orange (1971), was based on Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel of the same name.
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New Species
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January 16, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180116111107.htm
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Zoology: Luminescent lizards
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Chameleons are known to communicate with conspecifics by altering their surface coloration. Munich researchers have now found that the bony tubercles on the heads of many species fluoresce under UV light and form impressive patterns.
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Biogenic fluorescence is mainly known from marine organisms, but is rare in terrestrial vertebrates. "So we could hardly believe our eyes when we illuminated the chameleons in our collection with a UV lamp, and almost all species showed blue, previously invisible patterns on the head, some even over the whole body," says David Prötzel, lead author of the new study and PhD student at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology (ZSM). To understand the phenomenon, the researchers used a variety of modern methods. Micro-CT scans showed that the pattern of fluorescence exactly matched the distribution of tubercles pattern on the skull. The tissue analyses yielded another surprise: "Our histological 3D reconstruction shows that the skin covering the tubercles on the skull is very thin and consists only of a transparent layer of epidermis,"explains Dr. Martin Heß from the BioCenter of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) in Munich. These patches effectively act as windows that enable UV light to reach the bone, where it is absorbed and then emitted again as blue fluorescent light."It has long been known that bones fluoresce under UV light, but that animals use this phenomenon to fluoresce themselves has surprised us and was previously unknown," says Dr. Frank Glaw, Curator of Herpetology at the Bavarian State Collection of Zoology.The tubercles fluoresce under UV light to form distinct patterns that represent certain species or species groups. In addition, the males in most species of the genus
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New Species
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January 11, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180111141738.htm
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Different strains of same bacteria trigger widely varying immune responses
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Genetic differences between different strains of the same pathogenic bacterial species appear to result in widely varying immune system responses, according to new research published in
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Previous research has found that different people vary in their susceptibility to infection with the same species of pathogenic bacteria. Individual differences in people's immune systems may explain this variability, but differences between bacterial strains could play a role, too.To better understand this role, Uri Sela of The Rockefeller University, New York, and colleagues studied different strains of two major species of pathogenic bacteria: The researchers found that, in blood from a single person, different strains of each species produced widely varied responses by T and B cells of the adaptive immune system -- the portion of the immune system responsible for creating "memory" of specific pathogens to protect against future infection. The same distinct responses to different strains were seen in blood samples from 10 additional donors.Next, the research team created mutant bacteria in which they deactivated "accessory" genes that are responsible for between-strain differences, leaving the "core" genome of the species intact. They found that the mutant strains triggered a dampened T cell response, suggesting that differences in "accessory" genes were responsible for the varied responses seen for unmutated strains.These findings suggest that differences in bacterial "accessory" genes -- not just differences between people -- may help explain the clinical variation generally found among patients infected with the same bacterial species.Previous research has often described "signature" immune responses to different bacteria using only a single strain for each species. However, based on findings of the current study, the researchers propose that immune response signatures should instead be defined according to the specific strain or the species' common "core genome." Such a shift could aid development of strategies for predicting disease outcomes in patients."The current practice with infected patient is to only identify the bacterial species," the authors elaborate. "Our findings raise the possibility that in the future we might need to define the specific infecting strain as part of the patient evaluation and treatment."
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New Species
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January 11, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180111101410.htm
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Spider eat spider: Scientists discover 18 new spider-hunting pelican spiders in Madagascar
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In 1854, a curious-looking spider was found preserved in 50 million-year-old amber. With an elongated neck-like structure and long mouthparts that protruded from the "head" like an angled beak, the arachnid bore a striking resemblance to a tiny pelican. A few decades later when living pelican spiders were discovered in Madagascar, arachnologists learned that their behavior is as unusual as their appearance, but because these spiders live in remote parts of the world they remained largely unstudied -- until recently.
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At the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, curator of arachnids and myriapods Hannah Wood has examined and analyzed hundreds of pelican spiders both in the field in Madagascar and through study of pelican spiders preserved in museum collections. Her analysis, focused on spiders of the Eriauchenius and Madagascarchaea genera, sorted the spiders she studied into 26 different species -- 18 of which have never before been described. Wood and colleague Nikolaj Scharff of the University of Copenhagen describe all 26 pelican spider species in the Jan. 11 issue of the journal Wood says pelican spiders are well known among arachnologists not only for their unusual appearance, but also for the way they use their long "necks" and jaw-like mouthparts to prey on other spiders. "These spiders attest to the unique biology that diversified in Madagascar," she said.Pelican spiders are active hunters, prowling the forest at night and following long silk draglines that lead them to their spider prey. When a pelican spider finds a victim, it swiftly reaches out and impales it on its long, fang-tipped "jaws," or chelicerae. Then it holds the capture away from its body, keeping itself safe from potential counterattacks, until the victim dies.Today's pelican spiders are "living fossils," Wood says -- remarkably similar to species found preserved in the fossil record from as long as 165 million years ago. Because the living spiders were found after their ancestors had been uncovered in the fossil record and presumed extinct, they can be considered a "Lazarus" taxon. In addition to Madagascar, modern-day pelican spiders have been found in South Africa and Australia -- a distribution pattern that suggests their ancestors were dispersed to these landmasses when the Earth's supercontinent Pangaea began to break up around 175 million years ago.Madagascar is home to vast numbers of plant and animal species that exist only on the island, but until recently, only a few species of pelican spiders had been documented there. In 2000, the California Academy of Sciences launched a massive arthropod inventory in Madagascar, collecting spiders, insects and other invertebrates from all over the island.Wood used those collections, along with specimens from other museums and spiders that she collected during her own field work in Madagascar, to conduct her study. Her detailed observations and measurements of hundreds of specimens led to the identification of 18 new species -- but Wood says there are almost certainly more to be discovered. As field workers continue to collect specimens across Madagascar, "I think there's going to be a lot more species that haven't yet been described or documented," she said.The spiders Wood personally collected, including holotypes (the exemplar specimens) for several of the new species, will join the U.S. National Entomological Collection at the Smithsonian, the second-largest insect collection in the world, where they will be preserved and accessible for further research by scientists across the globe.All of the pelican spiders that Wood described live only in Madagascar, an island whose tremendous biodiversity is currently threatened by widespread deforestation. The new species add to scientists' understanding of that biodiversity, and will help Wood investigate how pelican spiders' unusual traits have evolved and diversified over time. They also highlight the case for conserving what remains of Madagascar's forests and the biodiversity they contain, she says.Funding for this study was provided by the Danish National Research Foundation and the National Science Foundation.
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New Species
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January 10, 2018
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https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180110131503.htm
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Frogs reveal mechanism that determines viability of hybrids
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When two related species crossbreed, their genetic material crosses, which can lead to new species. But every so often there is a difference in the offspring, depending on which of the two species is the mother and which one is the father. A well-known example of a hybrid is a mule, the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. The other way around, the offspring of a female donkey and a male horse is a different animal: a hinny. It thus makes a difference which species is the father and which one is the mother.
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Both mules and hinnies are infertile, because donkeys and horses have a different number of chromosomes, the protein structures on which genetic material is present. Yeasts, plants, fish and amphibians (in contrast to mammals) can however produce fertile hybrids. Professor of Molecular Developmental Biology Gert Jan Veenstra: "For instance, in frogs a duplication of chromosomes can appear, in which the whole set of chromosomes from the father and the mother are passed on to the next generation." However, there is another problem: some hybrids are not viable, while the crossbreeding the other way around is. The embryos are genetically identical, but there is a difference in viability, depending on the father species and the mother species. Veenstra: "Even though it is vital for evolution, the mechanisms of viable and non-viable hybrids are to this date unknown."The scientists showed this phenomenon in research with two related frog species: On 10 January, researchers publish what went wrong during this crossbreeding: the maternal molecular machinery of the Western clawed frog cannot fully recognize the paternal chromosomes of the African clawed frog. Two specific pieces of the paternal chromosomes are incompatible with the maternal cell and thus the separation of the chromosomes during cell division is disrupted. These cells now lack a large number of important genes, such as genes for metabolism, and therefore quickly die.This shows there is a strong asymmetry when it comes to hybrids, depending on the father species and mother species. "These findings are important, because these type of hybrids are present in nature and in some cases lead to new species. When new species are formed, there seems to be a period of transition: closely related species are able to produce viable offspring, but if the chromosomes are no longer compatible it leads to asymmetric results of crossbreeding. When species further separate, crossbreeding no longer leads to viable offspring. We here show the cellular mechanism behind this phenomenon," states Gert Jan Veenstra.The viable hybrid of a male Western clawed frog and a female African clawed frog also revealed a molecular mechanism: parasitic DNA elements (transposons) are activated in one of the genomes. Veenstra: "The female's immune system is not wired to recognize the paternal transposons and hence does not repress them. As a consequence, parasitic DNA elements are now able to fulfill a new role: they can act as regulatory DNA that influences gene activity. This may have a large influence on formation and characteristics of a new species." These findings were published in
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