Many dung beetles use mammalian feces as a food source and build and relocate dung balls to lay eggs and shelter their larvae. This behavior provides many ecosystem services including nutrient cycling, secondary seed dispersal, ...
Ecology
Nov 20, 2023
0
7
The Pantanal wetlands in western Brazil are famed as a paradise of biodiversity, but these days they have enormous clouds of smoke billowing over them, as raging wildfires reduce vast expanses to scorched earth.
Environment
Nov 15, 2023
0
7
Chimpanzees use high ground to conduct reconnaissance on rival groups, often before making forays into enemy territory at times when there is reduced risk of confrontation, a new study suggests.
Plants & Animals
Nov 2, 2023
0
267
A recent study published in Nature Geoscience uses supercomputer climate models to examine how a supercontinent, dubbed Pangea Ultima (also called Pangea Proxima), that will form 250 million years from now will result in ...
Earth Sciences
Oct 21, 2023
5
254
Rice University scientists used a commercially available mixed-reality headset with custom-designed software to measure and analyze forest floor vegetation, demonstrating a correlation between animal diversity and the mapped ...
Ecology
Oct 19, 2023
0
99
Because literature and film so often depict nature as inherently unfair, people assume that animals live in a "dog-eat-dog world." Inequality might seem like an inevitable fact of life, but a new analysis of data for 66 species ...
Evolution
Oct 16, 2023
0
99
The Texas ocelot (Leopardus pardalis albescens) is endangered due to historic hunting, habitat loss, inbreeding, and traffic collisions. Today, only between 50 and 80 ocelots remain in the U.S., exclusively in Willacy and ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 13, 2023
0
60
Since gay couples have fewer children, the high frequency of same-sex relationships in humans is puzzling from an evolutionary point of view. Perhaps there are social advantages such relationships confer on a group, or perhaps ...
Evolution
Oct 12, 2023
0
19
Both elegant and fierce, killer whales are some of the oceans' top predators, but even they can be exposed to environmental pollution. Now, in the largest study to date on North Atlantic killer whales, researchers in Environmental ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 11, 2023
0
38
When an asteroid hit the Earth 66 million years ago, it set off a devastating mass extinction. The dinosaurs (except for a few birds) all died out, along with lots of the mammals. But some small mammals survived, laying the ...
Evolution
Oct 5, 2023
0
204
