Researchers have found declines in the number and diversity of bird populations at nine sites surveyed in northern New Mexico, where eight species vanished over time while others had considerably dropped.
"These birds are not using these habitats anymore," said Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Jeanne Fair, lead author of the study published recently in the...
Logging site slash removal may be boon for wild bees in managed forests
New research suggests the removal of timber harvest residue during harvesting may be a boon for wild bees, an important step toward better understanding the planet's top group of pollinators.
The findings are important because bees are the driving force behind $100 billion in global economic impact each year, with insect pollinators enhancing the reproduction of...
Zombie gene protects against cancer — in elephants
An estimated 17 percent of humans worldwide die from cancer, but less than five percent of captive elephants -- who also live for about 70 years, and have about 100 times as many potentially cancerous cells as humans -- die from the disease.
Three years ago, research teams from the University of Chicago and the University...
Snake fungal disease alters skin microbiome in eastern Massasaugas
In the first study of its kind, researchers characterized the skin microbiome of a population of free-ranging snakes to begin to understand how the animals' environmental microbial community may promote disease resistance as well as how it may be disrupted by infection.
The study, which was recently published in Scientific Reports, a Nature research journal, focused...
How MERS Coronavirus evolves to infect different species
In the past 15 years, two outbreaks of severe respiratory disease were caused by coronaviruses transmitted from animals to humans. In 2003, SARS-CoV (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus) spread from civets to infect more than 8,000 people, leading to a year-long global public health emergency. MERS-CoV (Middle East respiratory syndrome coronavirus), first identified in 2012,...
Fishing quotas upended by nuclear DNA analysis
For decades, mitochondrial DNA analysis has been the dominant method used to make decisions about fishing quotas, culling, hunting quotas, or translocating animals from one population of a threatened species to another.
A study published in Scientific Reports shows that, while mitochondrial DNA analysis is very useful for a number of applications, analysing genetic differences for...