What drives ecosystems to instability?

Trying to decipher all of the factors that influence the behavior of complex ecological communities can be a daunting task. However, MIT researchers have now shown that the behavior of these ecosystems can be predicted based ...

Fossils reveal swimming patterns of long extinct cephalopod

Computational fluid dynamics can be used to study how extinct animals used to swim. Scientists studied 65 million-year-old cephalopod fossils to gain deeper understanding of modern-day cephalopod ecosystems.

Payments for ecosystem services? Here's the guidebook

A team of investors, development organizations, conservationists, economists, and ecologists have published in the journal Science six natural science principles to ensure success of Payments for Ecosystem Services, mechanisms ...

Chemical modules that mimic predator-prey and other behaviors

Scientists are reporting development of chemical modules that can reproduce, on an "unprecedented" molecular level, changes and interactions that occur in natural populations of plants and animals, including those of hunting ...

The Amazon River is 11 million years old

The Amazon River originated as a transcontinental river around 11 million years ago and took its present shape approximately 2.4 million years ago. These are the most significant results of a study on two boreholes drilled ...

Predicting changes in microbial food webs

Increasing either temperature or nutrients can hurt ecosystems by destabilizing food webs, which are all of the interconnected food chains that make communities behave the way they do. When temperature and nutrients increase ...

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