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Tag: "wild" at biology news

New strategy developed to combat West Nile Virus

...ring nesting and roosting sites of many species of wild birds, which act as hosts and carriers for the diseases. While confined in the hammocks, the mosquitoes feed almost exclusively on the nesting birds and as a result, each bird is bitten by numerous mosquitoes. A single infected bird can thus infect m...

Man may have caused pre-historic extinctions

...). The accepted view had previously been that the wild horses became extinct long before the extinction of mammoths and the arrival of humans from Asia - ruling out the possibility that they were over-hunted by man. One theory had been that a period of climate cooling wiped them out. However, the resea...

The secret lives of sea slugs

...irms that many of this creature's behaviors in the wild are similar to published descriptions of laboratory behavior.The navigational observations are among the study's most exciting findings, not only because they are new to science, but also because they suggest that sea slugs don't just inch randomly a...

Tamed 11,400 years ago, figs were likely first domesticated crop

...o a sedentary lifestyle grounded in the growing of wild crops such as barley and wheat marked a dramatic c...The scientists compared the ancient figs to modern wild and domesticated variants and determined that they were a mutant selectively propagated by humans. I...

Gene transfer using mutant form of good cholesterol cuts vascular plaque and inflammation

...he article's senior author. Compared to control, wild type apo A-I gene transfer led to about a 25 perce...erial wall. "We examined the ability of both the wild type and the apo A-I Milano gene to move cholesterol out of the macrophages, a process called choles...

Parasitic plants sniff out hosts

...earchers looked at other potential hosts including wild impatiens, and showed that the parasites were attracted to a wide variety of plants. They even found attraction to wheat plants, a poor host on which the dodder seedlings do not survive. However, when the researchers offered the seedlings a choice ...

Cougar predation key to ecosystem health

...re fully understood. In systems with wild ungulates, the sustainability of riparian habitats and biodiversity may require both predation on these herbivores as well as the fear of predation to further affect their behavior, the researchers concluded. Ripple and Beschta considered othe...

Save the whales? Sure, but how many?

...nd, of conservation. 'People want much more from wild animals than to see them just persist: we want animals to interact with their environment, evolve over time, be beautiful and useful to us, and to satisfy ethical teachings regarding respect for nature,' said Dr. Sanderson. Sanderson's system argue...

A human taste for rarity spells disaster for endangered species

...threaten orangutans, monkeys, reptiles, birds, and wild cats, as well as a wide variety of arachnids, insects, and fish. And it appears that pet trade dealers read the scientific literature for clues to the next hot species: immediately after an article recognized the small Indonesian turtle (Chelodina mc...

New evidence of early horse domestication

...l. "No one in their right mind would try to milk a wild mare," said Olsen. There is also evidence that the Botai were carrying a lot of heavy material, like rocks and large skulls, over long distances. That is a lot more practical and explicable if they used pack horses. Later people of the same regio...

Disappearing nest egg: Researcher studying declining numbers of macaws

...e, 1 is extinct, another has become extinct in the wild and 7 other species are endangered. "The numbers for all macaw species are shrinking," he says. There are several reasons for their declining numbers. The birds are highly prized by the pet trade industry, and they are losing their native habitat...

Wolves are suffering less from inbreeding than expected

...opulation. This kind of detailed information about wild animals is quite unique, but a necessary prerequisite for calculations of so called inbreeding coefficients. - The inbreeding coefficient is a measure of the proportion of the DNA that is inbred. It varies between 0 and 100%. If a brother and sist...

Singing for survival

...ts at the University of St Andrews discovered that wild gibbons in Thailand have developed a unique song as a natural defence to predators. Literally singing for survival, the gibbons appear to use the song not just to warn their own group members but those in neighbouring areas. They said, "We are int...

Wheat gene may boost foods' nutrient content

...versity of Haifa in Israel have cloned a gene from wild wheat that increases the protein, zinc and iron co...the reintroduction of the functional gene from the wild species into commercial wheat varieties has the potential to increase the nutritional value of a lar...

Special chip provides better picture of salmon health

...ndustry thousands and also help conserve dwindling wild salmon populations. Atlantic salmon are the most...urately and also enable conservationists to sample wild populations to ascertain their health and wellbeing. The development of the chip is the culminati...

For crickets, parasitic flies can stop the music

...e crickets sing and how females respond. Examining wild crickets native to North Florida, they devised two sets of experiments to test this hypothesis. In experiments involving male crickets, they gauged differences in male singing in part by capturing males, placing them in containers in the field, th...

Wild tigers need cat food

...igh. "This study shows that even well-protected wild tiger populations have naturally high rates of annual losses, and yet do fine because of their high reproductive rates," said WCS researcher Dr. Ullas Karanth, lead author of the study. "The conservation implications of this study show that effectiv...

Abnormal overexpression of p53 is a predictive molecular biomarker

...rs, which uses an adenoviral vector to deliver the wild type p53 gene to tumor cells. Results were presented at the first meeting on Molecular Diagnostics in Cancer Therapeutic Development, organized by the American Association for Cancer Research. "Not only do we now have a way to predict if the gene t...

Extreme environment changes fish appearance

.... The Amargosa pupfish began to look more like the wild Devils Hole pupfish. "Restricting food availability and raising the temperature just a few degrees shifts morphology dramatically," Lema said. The findings have implications for conserving species, Lema said. On one hand, the fish may be mor...

'Trojan Horse' agent halts bone metastasis in mice

...ed toxin, gelonin, derived from a plant that grows wild in India, and used bacteria to produce the fusion protein. The agent is designed to enter new blood vessel cells in tumors through expressed VEGF receptors and, once inside, the "Trojan Horse" toxin destroys the cell, disrupting the ability of tumors...

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