Survival of the thickest: Big brains make mammal populations less dense
Mammals with big brains tend to be less abundant in local areas than those with smaller brains, new research has shown.
Mammals with big brains tend to be less abundant in local areas than those with smaller brains, new research has shown.
Evolution
Dec 23, 2020
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Several scientific studies have shown how species that have been introduced by humans in new places are different compared to how they are in their native areas. Usually this is interpreted as an adaptation to the new place, ...
Evolution
Dec 18, 2020
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In otherwise energetic deserts at the bottom of the sea, researchers have found oases where microbes can harvest energy. Remarkably, the microbes first have to be buried under starving conditions for 80,000 years. An international ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 10, 2020
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Researchers from the DSI/NRF Center for Invasion Biology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa have found that 100 years after guttural toads were introduced to the islands of Mauritius and Réunion, their overall body ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 09, 2020
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Early populations shifted from quasi-egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies to communities governed by a centralized authority in the middle to late Holocene, but how the transition occurred still puzzles anthropologists. ...
Archaeology
Nov 30, 2020
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Federal environment minister Sussan Ley this week announced A$2 million for a national audit of Australia's koalas, as part of an A$18 million package to protect the vulnerable species.
Ecology
Nov 26, 2020
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Vertebrate populations—from birds and fish to antelope—are not, in general, declining. Despite what has previously been thought and said.
Ecology
Nov 18, 2020
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Researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU), together with national and international collaborators, have developed statistical methods that allows mapping and forecasting of wildlife populations across ...
Plants & Animals
Nov 16, 2020
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Mammal defaunation—the loss of mammals to extinction, extirpation and population decline—in the Neotropics and its adverse effects is the focus for two scientific papers produced recently by a group of scientists led ...
Ecology
Nov 11, 2020
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Animals that live slowly—breeding less rapidly and living longer—could be "reservoirs" of diseases that could jump to new species including humans, new research suggests.
Ecology
Nov 09, 2020
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In population genetics and population ecology, population size (usually denoted N) is the number of individual organisms in a population.
The effective population size (Ne) is defined as "the number of breeding individuals in an idealized population that would show the same amount of dispersion of allele frequencies under random genetic drift or the same amount of inbreeding as the population under consideration." Ne is usually less than N (the absolute population size) and this has important applications in conservation genetics.
Small population size results in increased genetic drift. Population bottlenecks are when population size reduces for a short period of time.
Overpopulation may indicate any case in which the population of any species of animal may exceed the carrying capacity of its ecological niche.
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