dominance

Live fast, die young true for forests too

...phenson and van Mantgem pointed out that increased dominance by younger trees could also lead to changes in the amount of carbon stored in forests, though the direction and magnitude of such potential changes are currently unknown and require more research. Atmospheric carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping gas impli...

Aggressive aquatic species invading Great Lakes

...rritory from native fish plays a key role in their dominance of the Great Lakes. In the study, McMaster's Sigal Balshine, an assistant professor of psychology, and her colleagues report that gobies win territory disputes against native logperch regardless of whether or not they were the original resident of t...

Scientists journey to southern Africa to unravel the secret world of elephant communication

...impact of acoustic and seismic estrus calls on the dominance hierarchy among bulls. "Our work is really at the interface of geophysics, neurophysiology and ecology," she says. "We're asking questions that no one has really dealt with before." SIDEBAR: Anatomy of the trunk and feet offers new clues to elephan...

Did humans cause ecosystem collapse in ancient Australia?

...nt before the extinctions, we saw a quick shift in dominance from C4 drought-resistant trees, shrubs and grasses, to C3 desert plants. " Why did the scientists point to humans as the instigators of the ecological changes? First, they ruled out the other usual suspect--global climate change. They looked at the...

Sudden change in social status triggers genetic response in male fish, study finds

...e that we usually think of in fish." Reversible dominance The PloS Biology study is the latest in a serie...that are used for courtship and breeding. However, dominance among male cichlids is reversible: If a subordinate successfully challenges a dominant male in a fac...

Past experience of pheromones induces dominant courtship behavior in fruit flies

...re able to demonstrate that a male shows courtship dominance behavior over young males if he has been exposed t...le adult male was sufficient to make males exhibit dominance behavior when they reached adulthood. The researchers found that, intriguingly, it was not enough fo...

Hyena mothers give their cubs a helpful dose of hormones

... shift in how scientists view the establishment of dominance in mammals. ...

Typhoid fever led to the fall of Athens

...ta, ending the Golden Age of Pericles and Athenian dominance in the ancient world. It is thought that up to one third of the Athenians, including their charismatic leader, Pericles, perished in the epidemic. Until now our understanding of this outbreak was based on the account by the fifth century B.C. Greek...

Male rivalry increases when females at most fertile, say researchers

...shown to male participants who provided ratings of dominance for each image. A dominant person was defined as ...ght for her attention. Similarly in humans, rated dominance increases when the female is most fertile. What is interesting here is that male behaviour is deter...

Forsyth scientists gain greater understanding of how embryos differentiate left from right

...ment, right-left hand preference, right/left brain dominance and a variety of birth defects in humans. A team of Forsyth Institute scientists, led by Michael Levin, PhD, Director of the Forsyth Center for Regenerative and Developmental Biology, examined the molecular and genetic factors that control left/rig...

Mosquito spray increases toxicity of pyrethroids in creek, study finds

...st at Pacific EcoRisk. Pyrethroids have risen to dominance as organophosphate pesticides, including diazinon and chlorpyrifos, are phased out due to concerns over their effects on the human nervous system. (Organophosphates have been largely eliminated from residential use, but are still widely used on agric...

Ready, set, mutate?and may the best microbe win

...that one genetic change translated into real-world dominance of one population over another. Rice University biologists, using an ingenious experiment that forced bacteria to compete in a head-to-head contest for evolutionary dominance, today offer the first glimpse of how individual genetic-level adaptations...

Just like us, social stress prompts hamsters to overeat, gain weight

...d. "Hamster aggression is highly ritualized, with dominance or submission generally established within the first minute and maintained thereafter through social signals and social communication between the opponents," the authors wrote. The intensity of most agonistic encounters was moderate, with some chasin...

Researchers find protein that silences genes

...iologists thought that gene silencing in nucleolar dominance was a result of one set of ribosomal RNA genes bei...osomal RNA genes are regulated and where nucleolar dominance occurs. "We found HDA6 at the scene of the crime, which was reassuring," Pikaard said. Ph.D. stu...

Fish species plays surprise role in aiding coral reef recovery

...udy intentionally triggered a phase shift to algal dominance on a healthy reef. They then filmed the reef’s recovery with remote underwater digital videos cameras. Remarkably, only two of the 27 herbivorous fish species present on the reefs had any significant impact on its recovery from algal overgrowth. What...

Fish can determine their social rank by observation alone, study finds

...line. "These fights, taken together, imply the dominance hierarchy A>B>C>D>E," the authors ... two rivals were ranked very close together on the dominance hierarchy. "These results show that fish do, in fact, use transitive inference to figure out whe...

Undergraduate research shows leaderless honeybee organizing

...sion maker,” Schnieder said. “The colony is not a dominance hierarchy and, from a human perspective, this is unusual. Our human society is very dominance hierarchy structured --we have centralized systems of control. But bee colony systems of control are...