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Tag: "rainforest" at biology news

Researchers find 24 species believed new to science in Suriname rainforest

...ue of exploring unknown regions such as Suriname’s rainforest to assess the need to conserve them. The study ...d region of mountain savannah forest, high dryland rainforest and palm swamp with freshwater sources clean enough to support abundant fish and amphibian life. ...

The kapok connection -- Study explains rainforest similarities

... over 10 to 15 million years." Dick studied the rainforest form of Ceiba pentandra, a species of kapok that grows taller than a 16-story building, its head poking above the forest canopy. Its flowers produce more than 50 gallons of nectar per tree in a season, attracting bats that travel as far as 12 mile...

Lessons from the orangutans: Upright walking may have begun in the trees

...e data, Thorpe spent a year living in the Sumatran rainforest and recording virtually every move the orangutans ...frica became alternately wetter and drier, and the rainforest grew increasingly patchy. Apes living in the forest canopy would have begun to encounter gaps betwee...

Scientists: As rainfall changes, tropical plants may acclimate

...ls but have vastly different rainfall. The wettest rainforest sites receive an astonishing 196 inches of rain annually, while the driest sites in this study get about 79 inches. "That's the range of rainfall you might find across the entire tropics, but that would usually be over hundreds or thousands of kil...

Paper challenges 1491 Amazonian population theories

... the Americas, and that in Amazonia, at least, the rainforest is the product of long term human use, has been us... been disturbed and that the view of the Amazonian rainforest as a built landscape is gaining momentum. There are extremes at either ends, and the majority of peo...

New species declared: Clouded leopard on Borneo and Sumatra

...a is an entirely new species of cat. The secretive rainforest animal was originally thought to be the same speci...the Heart of Borneo, a wild, mountainous region of rainforest the size of Kansas. WWF recently released a report showing that scientists had identified at least ...

The subtleties of tropical forest demise

...irulent chytrid-fungus pathogen that is decimating rainforest amphibians throughout the tropical world. (2) Those that are growing rapidly in importance, such as destructive surface fires in tropical forests. (3) Those that are poorly understood, such as the impacts of global warming and other growing atmospher...

LSU professor discovers new species

...One of the best methods for finding lizards in the rainforest is to look under logs. We found two individuals of the new species under one log and two more under another." With more than 15 years of fieldwork experience behind him, Austin knew immediately that he had found a new species. After collecting the li...

Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity

...rovide fruit, nectar, and homes for a diversity of rainforest animals.? To understand how fragmentation is aff... and hence store less carbon, than do the original rainforest trees they replaced. The carbon from the dead rainforest trees is broken down by microbes and fungi...

Dust to gust

...f of the dust needed for fertilizing the Brazilian rainforest is supplied by a valley in northern Chad, accordin...ore than a decade that the existence of the Amazon rainforest depends on a supply of minerals washed off by rain from the soil in the Sahara and blown across the ...

Female guppies risk their lives to avoid too much male attention

...males. Observing wild population of guppies in the rainforest of Trinidad, the researchers found that female guppies swim in habitats that contain few males ?but many predators. "Male guppies spend most of their time displaying to females. But if their courtship displays don't impress the females, males will a...

Butterfly farming to help save rain forest

...in Guyana that will help support 5000 people in 16 rainforest communities and help save the rainforest itself. The University of Warwick team will work with the Iwokrama International Centre for Rain Fo...

Agriculture and tropical conservation: rethinking old ideas

...ewed studies of biodiversity in the Atlantic coast rainforest of Brazil, a region that is unusual in having areas of tremendous biological variety adjacent to highly developed, industrialized areas. "The area has some of the highest biodiversity in the world, but it all occurs in fragments of forest," Vanderm...

Primates take weather into account when searching for fruits

...s from dawn to dusk over 210 days in their natural rainforest habitat of Kibale Forest, Uganda, the scientists obtained an almost complete record of their foraging decisions in relation to their preferred food, figs. The data showed that the monkeys were more likely to revisit fig trees (in which they had found...

The vicious cycle of rainforest destruction

...he two major vegetation systems in the tropics are rainforest and savanna. As it gets warmer and drier the rainforest gets invaded by savanna, which has fewer trees and holds less carbon in the soil. Savanna also doesn...

Insect predation sheds light on food web recovery after the dinosaur extinction

... thick leaves and drip tips, indicating a tropical rainforest completely unlike the other Paleocene floras. This site was on the eastern slope of the Paleocene Front Range, and Johnson and Ellis' work, as well as recent paleoclimate modeling simulations, has suggested that the local geography allowed high rain...

Poison dart frog mimics gain when birds learn to stay away

... a harmless, colorful frog living in the Amazonian rainforest gets protected from predators not by mimicking its most poisonous neighbor, but by looking like a frog who's poison packs less punch. The Texas biologists studied three species of poison dart frogs--one highly toxic species, one less toxic species a...

Amazon rainforest greens up in the dry season

The Amazon rainforest puts on its biggest growth spurt during the dry se...m of the Amazon rainforest, the largest old-growth rainforest on the planet, is crucial for understanding how rainforests and other tropical biomes function and h...

Diverse tropical forests defy metabolic ecology models

...ndly understory shrubs to enormous buttress-rooted rainforest giants festooned with vines and peppered with orchids, ferns and bromeliads. Tropical trees depend on animals for pollination and seed dispersal and are constantly assaulted by insects, fungi, maelstrom and machete. Furthermore, soils, rainfall, the ...

GPSDB, the free Gene and Protein Synonyms DataBase

The search for El Dorado in the Amazonian rainforest might not have yielded pots of gold, but it has led to unearthing a different type of gold mine: some of the globe's richest soil that can transform poor soil into highly fertile ground. That's not all. Scientists have a method to reproduce this soi...

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