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Tag: "atlantic" at biology news

FSU scientist warns North Atlantic right whale facing extinction

The North Atlantic right whale's future looks grim if the current mortality rates continue, according to Florida State University assistant professor of oceanography Douglas Nowacek and a group of fellow scientists from across the nation. . .. In it, Nowacek and his colleagues contend that while the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) National Marine Fisheries Service has bee...

How satellite tracking revealed the migratory mysteries of endangered Atlantic loggerhead turtles

Their journeys are among the longest in the animal kingdom and they have largely remained a mystery until now. An international team of scientists led by the University of Exeter have uncovered the migratory secrets of endangered loggerhead turtles in West Africa and the results could have huge implications for strategies to protect them. . In a paper in the journal Current Biology, Dr Brendan Go...

Ancient trans-Atlantic swarm brought locusts to the New World

Somewhere between three and five million years ago, a massive swarm of locusts took off from the west coast of Africa and made an unlikely voyage across the Atlantic Ocean to colonize the New World, says an international team of researchers. . Using genetic evidence from more than 20 species of locusts, scientists from the Universities of Toronto, Arizona, Maryland, Cornell University and the U.S...

Tropical Atlantic cooling and African deforestation correlate to drought, report scientists

Against the backdrop of the Montreal Summit on global climate being held this week, an article on African droughts and monsoons, by a University of California, Santa Barbara scientist and others, which appears in the December issue of the journal Geology, underlines concern about the effects of global climate change. . Tropical ocean temperatures and land vegetation have an important effect on A...

Microbes hitchhike across Atlantic on desert dust

Bacteria and fungi, some with the potential to cause disease in plants or animals, may be finding their way from Africa to the Americas by hitchhiking on microscopic dust particles kicked up by storms in the Sahara, according to research presented today at the 106th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in Orlando, Florida. . "This study presents evidence of early summer survi...

Brazil creates buffer zone around coral reefs off Atlantic coast

The Brazilian government has created an official buffer zone around the Abrolhos National Marine Park to protect the biologically richest coral reefs in the South Atlantic. . .. Under Brazilian law, buffer zones around protected ar...

A dichotomy in migration patterns found for sea turtles in east Atlantic

Studying members of a large population of loggerhead sea turtles that nest on the Cape Verde islands off of West Africa, researchers have found an unexpected dichotomy in turtle behavior: While some turtles leave the nesting grounds to feed on bottom-dwelling sea life in shallow coastal waters, others leave Cape Verde to roam the much deeper open ocean along the African coast and exhibit a distin...