A Colombian court on Friday called for the hunting of hippos, introduced to the country in the 1980s by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
Ecology
Sep 7, 2024
0
3
In 1872 Leland Stanford, the founder of California's Stanford University, hired an eccentric inventor named Eadweard Muybridge to help resolve a supposed (but undocumented) bet: did a trotting horse's feet leave the ground ...
Plants & Animals
Jul 29, 2024
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7
A pair of evolutionary biomechanics specialists at the University of London's, Royal Veterinary College, has found that when hippos run at full speed, all four of their feet are regularly in the air.
The fruit fly, Drosophila, has been used by scientists for more than 100 years to unravel key features of life on Earth, such as how animals respond to the sun and how the bodies of animals are patterned from head to tail.
Cell & Microbiology
Apr 29, 2024
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49
Herds of endangered hippos stuck in the mud of dried-up ponds are in danger of dying in drought-struck Botswana, conservation authorities told AFP Friday.
Environment
Apr 26, 2024
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46
Australian researchers have discovered a new way that epithelial cells, which form layers in organs like the skin and stomach, attach to one another, and how they perceive growth signals at these attachments, helping them ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 21, 2023
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69
Modern hippos first dispersed in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene, according to a study published Nov. 22, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Beniamino Mecozzi of the Sapienza University of Rome and colleagues.
Paleontology & Fossils
Nov 22, 2023
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251
Colombia will cull some of the 166 hippos descended from a small herd imported by deceased drug lord Pablo Escobar in the 1980s, the country's environment minister said Thursday.
Ecology
Nov 3, 2023
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14
Hippos' huge tusks and wide gape restrict grinding jaw movements, making their chewing inefficient, according to a study by Annika Avedik and Marcus Clauss at the University of Zurich, Switzerland published in the open-access ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 4, 2023
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1
Extinct dwarf hippos that once roamed Madagascar lived in forests rather than open grasslands preferred by common hippos on mainland Africa, researchers at the University of Cincinnati discovered.
Ecology
Jul 8, 2023
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214
Biodiversity is the degree of variation of life forms within a given ecosystem, biome, or an entire planet. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of ecosystems. Biodiversity is in part a function of climate. In terrestrial habitats, tropical regions are typically rich whereas polar regions support fewer species.
Rapid environmental changes typically cause mass extinctions. One estimate is that less than 1% of the species that have existed on Earth are extant.
Since life began on Earth, five major mass extinctions and several minor events have led to large and sudden drops in biodiversity. The Phanerozoic eon (the last 540 million years) marked a rapid growth in biodiversity via the Cambrian explosion—a period during which nearly every phylum of multicellular organisms first appeared. The next 400 million years included repeated, massive biodiversity losses classified as mass extinction events. In the Carboniferous, rainforest collapse led to a great loss of plant and animal life. The Permian–Triassic extinction event, 251 million years ago, was the worst; vertebrate recovery took 30 million years. The most recent, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, occurred 65 million years ago, and has often attracted more attention than others because it resulted in the extinction of the dinosaurs.
The period since the emergence of humans has displayed an ongoing biodiversity reduction and an accompanying loss of genetic diversity. Named the Holocene extinction, the reduction is caused primarily by human impacts, particularly habitat destruction. Conversely, biodiversity impacts human health in a number of ways, both positively and negatively.
The United Nations designated 2011-2020 as the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
