A few years ago while on a fishing trip in the Florida Keys, biologist Lori Schweikert came face to face with an unusual quick-change act. She reeled in a pointy-snouted reef fish called a hogfish and threw it onboard. But ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 22, 2023
0
103
As butterflies flit among flowers, they don't all view blossoms the same way. In a phenomenon called sexually dimorphic vision, females of some butterfly species perceive ultraviolet color while the males see light and dark. ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 10, 2023
0
502
A new paper in Genome Biology and Evolution, published by Oxford University Press, finds that the annulated sea snake, a species of venomous snake found in ocean waters around Australia and Asia, appears to have evolved to ...
Evolution
Jul 13, 2023
0
67
Is it possible to control an animal's or a cell's behavior using light? In recent years, remarkable progress in optogenetics has been made as research methods come close to realizing this goal.
Plants & Animals
Nov 28, 2022
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25
Gathering vision data for hundreds of vertebrates and invertebrates, U of A biologists have deepened scientists' understanding of animal vision, including the colors they see.
Plants & Animals
Jun 6, 2022
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927
Many life forms use light as an important biological signal, including animals with visual and non-visual systems. But now, researchers from Japan have found that neuronal cells may have initially evolved to regulate digestion ...
Evolution
Apr 6, 2021
0
56
The colors in a flower patch appear completely different to a bear, a honeybee, a butterfly and humans. The ability to see these colors is generated by specific properties of opsins—light-sensitive proteins in the retina ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 9, 2021
0
142
Evolution is a tinkerer, not an engineer. "Evolution does not produce novelties from scratch. It works with what already exists," wrote Nobel laureate François Jacob in 1977, and biologists continue to find this to be true.
Molecular & Computational biology
Apr 3, 2020
0
329
Vision is a crucial sense for most animals, and vertebrates have evolved a highly adaptable set of opsin genes that generate light-sensitive pigments to decode the retinal image. These opsins include a rod opsin to help see ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 9, 2020
0
179
Squids, octopuses, cuttlefish, amphibians, and chameleon lizards are among the animals that can change the color of their skin in a blink of an eye. They have photoreceptors in their skin that operate independently of their ...
Evolution
Oct 16, 2019
2
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