When British naturalist Charles Darwin traveled to the Galapagos Islands in 1835, he took notice of the giant kelp forests ringing the islands. He believed that if those forests were destroyed, a significant number of species ...
Ecology
Mar 14, 2018
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76
The delicately mannered dance between discerning eggs and vying sperm is more complicated than scientists once believed, and it may hold secrets about the evolution of new species.
Plants & Animals
Nov 8, 2017
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147
A sea otter's survival depends on their ability to catch and eat prey. Unlike most marine mammals, sea otters lack a thick layer of blubber to insulate them from the frigid waters of the Pacific Ocean. Instead, they rely ...
Plants & Animals
Oct 25, 2017
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137
A new high-definition genome sequence of the sea cucumber provides molecular insights into its ability to regenerate, according to a new study publishing 12 October in the open access journal PLOS Biology by Xiaojun Zhang, ...
Biotechnology
Oct 12, 2017
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446
Genes which determine animal complexity – or what makes humans so much more complex than a fruit fly or a sea urchin – have been identified for the first time.
Biotechnology
Sep 29, 2017
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693
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers from the U.K. and the U.S. has identified the remains of a 430-million-year-old extinct echinoderm found in a fossil bed in Herefordshire, England. In their paper published in Proceedings ...
When diving in the Gulf of Maine a few years back, Jennifer Dijkstra expected to be swimming through a flowing kelp forest that had long served as a nursery and food for juvenile fish and lobster.
Ecology
Aug 22, 2017
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500
Despite popular metaphors and cartoons depicting straightforward "food chains," ecologists such as Brown University Professor Jon Witman typically doubt that they'll see predators in diverse tropical ecosystems have meaningful ...
Ecology
May 1, 2017
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210
Thirty years ago a mysterious disease wiped out long-spined black sea urchins across the Caribbean, leading to massive algal overgrowth that smothered already overfished coral reefs. Now, marine biologists at the Smithsonian ...
Environment
Jan 5, 2017
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47
Some sea creatures cover themselves with hard shells and spines, while vertebrates build skeletons out of the same minerals. How do these animals get the calcium they need to build these strong mineral structures? Professors ...
Cell & Microbiology
Dec 5, 2016
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5
