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Tag: "birds" at biology news

Mercury contamination of fish warrants worldwide public warning

...f the world. Methylmercury levels in fish-eating birds and mammals in some parts of the world are reaching toxic levels, which may lead to population declines in these species and possibly in fish populations as well. "The policy implications of these findings are clear," said James Wiener, a Wisc...

Hotspots of mercury contamination identified in eastern North America

...h team surveying mercury contamination in fish and birds in the northeastern United States and southeastern Canada has identified five "hotspots" where concentrations of the element exceed those established for human or wildlife health. The team focused on levels of the potent neurotoxin in yellow perch an...

Protein fragments sequenced in 68 million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex

... to a recent and still controversial proposal that birds and dinosaurs are evolutionarily related. The HMS ...n the April 13 Science. "Most people believe that birds evolved from dinosaurs, but that’s all based on the architecture of the bones," said John Asara, dir...

University of Alberta researchers unravel intricate animal patterns

...r off. But how does a school of fish or a flock of birds know how to move from one configuration to another...rom their neighbors. "For example, some species of birds use directional communication, and therefore, we may assume that in this case the behaviour of an in...

Homing pigeons get their bearings from their beaks

It has long been recognized that birds possess the ability to use the Earth’s magnetic fi...-axis magnetometer. The study suggests that the birds sense the magnetic field independent of their motion and posture and thus can identify their geograp...

Large size crucial for Amazon forest reserves

...ed fragments lack many species" said Ferraz. "Many birds are so uncommon that they will rarely occur in sma...ifficulty of this study, say the authors, was that birds are hard to detect. When one samples a plot of forest it is easy to miss species that actually exist...

Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds

...n the Mediterranean, may feed to a large extent on birds (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 9...intering grounds in Africa, whereas in spring only birds having survived winter mortality return to their breeding area. In addition, young birds in autumn ...

Computer scientists join in search for ivory-billed woodpecker

... Song and Goldberg programmed ACONE to distinguish birds from other objects and only record the birds with its two digital cameras, Arecont Vision's AV3100s. "It's a fast, flying object," Song said....

Stem cell transplants explored at Stanford as a possible treatment for hearing loss

...ars. His lab is also busy studying the ability of birds to regenerate the tiny hair cells in the cochlea. It's these cells that convert the mechanical energy of sound into electrical impulses that are sent to the brain so that a chicken, a mouse or a human can hear. Chickens, like all birds, have the ...

UF scientists discover new genus of frogmouth bird in Solomon Islands

... on a South Pacific island. New genera of living birds are rare discoveries ?fewer than one per year is a... inexpectata. "This discovery underscores that birds on remote Pacific islands are still poorly known, scientifically speaking," Steadman said. "Without ...

Old dinosaur research leads to new honor

...events ?to that time when mammals and reptiles and birds were just becoming separate from each other. It was an exciting time in history, about 270 million years ago ?it was between ice ages, just like the time we are living in now ?and I think my work has led to a greater understanding of what happened th...

Mosquito genes explain response to climate change

...rring in diverse groups of animals from insects to birds and mammals." The chromosomal map was created using mosquitoes that had developed in precisely controlled environmental rooms that allow the UO researchers to simulate climatic conditions occurring in nature anywhere in the world, from the tropics...

Bird sex is something else

We’ve all heard about the birds and the bees. But apparently when it comes to bird...blished today in the Journal of Biology shows that birds are extraordinary, because some bird genomes can live with an apparent overdose of sex-related genes...

Birds found to plan for the future

...ises the intriguing possibility that, like humans, birds may get anxious about the future. Research publish...lan for future food shortages by caching food. The birds are shown to have learned from their previous experiences of food scarcity, storing food for future ...

Study finds mercury prevalent in many western fish

...clear is the impact of that mercury on fish-eating birds and mammals, said Robert Hughes, also an author on the paper and an OSU fisheries and wildlife research associate professor. "If I were a mink or an otter," Hughes said, "I'd be concerned. Those guys are loading up on fish containing mercury and w...

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

...ry for transitive inference that appeared later in birds and mammals. "Any animal that has evolved a social system that requires combat among males will have some kind of eavesdropping capability allowing them to surreptitiously draw inferences about their social rank," Fernald said. "Cognitive capacit...

Scientists discover new species of distinctive cloud-forest rodent

... line, Manu is home to more species of mammals and birds than any equivalently sized area in the world. "Like other tropical mountain ranges, such as the Himalayas, Ruwenzoris, Virungas and Kinabalu, the Andes support a fantastic variety of habitats," said Bruce Patterson, MacArthur Curator of Mammals a...

Does evolution select for faster evolvers?

...the diverse menagerie of plants, mammals, insects, birds and other species that populate the earth. New studies by Rice University scientists suggest a possible answer; the speed of evolution has increased over time because bacteria and viruses constantly exchange transposable chunks of DNA between specie...

Human preference for other species could determine whether they survive

...ase of penguins, mostly black-and-white flightless birds that live predominantly in the Southern Hemisphere, those most popular with humans appear to be the ones that display markings of warm colors such as red, orange or intense yellow, said David Stokes, a conservation biologist at the University of Wash...

Huddling and a drop in metabolism allow penguins to survive the South Pole cold

... penguins maintain a lower rectal temperature than birds which were isolated from the colony (35.7°C vs. 37...cordings of deep body temperatures in free ranging birds throughout their breeding cycle by using long-term implanted data loggers. The researchers sought t...

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