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Tag: "islands" at biology news

Caribbean frogs started with a single, ancient voyage on a raft from South America

...theory had proposed that frog species on the large islands of Cuba, Jamaican, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico had... there across land bridges that existed when those islands were connected in a geologic arc about 70-to-80-million years ago. A second major theory proposed t...

Exploring the dark matter of the genome

...atin, the transposons constitute the sea. Here the islands are single-copy genes, or lengths of DNA that code for RNAs other than the messenger RNA needed to make proteins, and other functional elements. Moderately repeating fragments like transposons and single-copy genes were assembled by comparing num...

Prey not hard-wired to fear predators

...here the top predators no longer exist. (the polar islands of Greenland and Svalbard, Norway) Locations where native predators have been re-established after once being extinguished. (Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks ) To test reactions of animals living without their traditional p...

Antarctic icebergs -- Hotspots of ocean life

...tudy in this week’s journal Science these floating islands of ice – some as large as a dozen miles across – are having a major impact on the ecology of the ocean around them, serving as “hotspots” for ocean life, with thriving communities of seabirds above and a web of phytoplankton, krill, and fish below. ...

Global survey of lizards reveals greater abundance of animals on islands than on mainland ecosystems

A comprehensive survey of lizards on islands around the world has confirmed what island biologi...seafaring explorers have long observed: Animals on islands are much more abundant than their counterparts on the mainland. Besides confirming that longstandin...

Invasion of the island bats

...s crystallized into a mathematical power function, islands and island archipelagoes have been thought of as b... into new species in geographic seclusion. Since islands have many times fewer species than the continent, it seemed only logical that continents were rich s...

City ants take the heat

... in other major cities. "We will quantify heat islands on the small scales that pertain to organisms, initially in Indianapolis and later in other major cities throughout the world," said Weng, an Associate Professor of Geography and Director of Indiana State's Center for Urban and Environmental Change. ...

Male-killing bacteria makes female butterflies more promiscuous

...cific Island and South-East Asian populations. The islands provide an ideal location because every island is differently affected by the male-killling bacteria so that each has a different ratio of males to females. The researchers assessed the natural sex ratio in 20 populations and combined this data wi...

Smithsonian scientists discover new marine species in eastern Pacific

...orenburg said. One of the unique features of the islands off the coast of Panama is that they host animals that normally are found in the Indo-Pacific, half a world away. "To think that the larvae of Hymenocera picta, a little shrimp we collected on Isla Seca, can survive a journey of more than 3,000 mile...

New species declared: Clouded leopard on Borneo and Sumatra

...e discovered that the clouded leopard found on the islands of Borneo and Sumatra is an entirely new species of cat. The secretive rainforest animal was originally thought to be the same species as the one found in mainland Southeast Asia. Genetic analysis conducted at the U.S. National Cancer Institute sh...

UF scientists discover new genus of frogmouth bird in Solomon Islands

... Islands. Theirs is the first frogmouth from these islands to be caught by scientists in more than 100 years....discovery underscores that birds on remote Pacific islands are still poorly known, scientifically speaking," Steadman said. "Without the help of local hunters,...

Flavanols in cocoa may offer benefits to the brain

...nd colleagues found the Kuna Indians living on the islands had significantly lower rates of heart disease and...nama mainland was 1,280 percent higher than on the islands and death from cancer was 630 percent higher. In his AAAS presentation, Hollenberg suggested that th...

Twenty of world's 162 grouper species threatened with extinction

...ce one of the most commonly landed groupers in the islands of the Western Atlantic Ocean, now is listed as Endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act and has virtually disappeared from most Caribbean reefs....

Lizards 'shout' against a noisy background

...s because different species are found on different islands all over the Caribbean. The lizards are not particularly closely related -- they are separated by 30 million years of evolution -- but they live in similar environments with the same obstacles to communication. So Ord is using them as a model to inve...

'Terror bird' arrived in North America before land bridge, study finds

...ars before the land bridge formed, probably across islands that formed what today is the Isthmus of Panama." The study will be published Jan. 23 in the online version of the journal Geology and featured in its February print edition. The terror bird was carnivorous, weighed about 330 pounds, had powerfu...

Scientist's persistence sheds light on marine science riddle

...ng the island rule: that small animals isolated on islands evolve to be larger than their mainland relatives, and large animals evolve to be smaller. In a paper to be published in September in the Journal of Biogeography, "The Island Rule and the Evolution of Body Size in the Deep Sea," Rosenberg and his co-...

Some butterflies travel farther, reproduce faster

...ecorded changes in the butterfly population on the islands for years. It's in the genes The fritillary live in distinct patches -- rocky outcroppings containing plants that serve as food and provide a hospitable home for the butterfly larvae to spend the winter. There are about 4,000 such patches on th...

Pressured by predators, lizards see rapid shift in natural selection

... (Leiocephalus carinatus) commonly found on nearby islands and known as a natural colonizer of small cays. Th...olis population had dropped by half or more on the islands with the predators, and in comparison to the lizards on the predator-free islands, long legs were mo...

New dwarf buffalo discovered by chance in the Philippines

...ection can produce dramatic body-size changes. On islands where there is limited food and a small population...eet lower. Because of this, some groups of current islands within the Philippines became connected by land. Some of the mammals, including water buffalo, proba...

Too mellow for our predatory world

...ey have been confronted with cats and dogs on some islands of the Archipelago. For scientists, they are there...e research platform of the Max Planck Society. The islands in the Pacific Ocean continue to be a magnet for evolutionary biologists. Nowhere else is it possibl...

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