Some lizards in the eastern U.S. have adapted to invasive fire ants -- which can bite, sting, and kill lizards -- reversing geographical trends in behavioral and physical traits used to avoid predators. A new study describing this reversal appears online on November 29, 2018, in the journal Global Change Biology and reveals that new...
Whale songs' changing pitch may be response to population, climate changes
Blue whales around the world are singing a little flat, and scientists may now have more clues as to the reason why.
A new study finds there's a seasonal variation in the whales' pitch correlated with breaking sea ice in the southern Indian Ocean. The new research also extends the mysterious long-term falling pitch to related...
'Stash your trash,' say rat researchers
Rats. Can't live with them, can't live without them -- or so it seems in a city like Chicago. Researchers from Lincoln Park Zoo's Urban Wildlife Institute and Davee Center for Epidemiology and Endocrinology set out to understand why. The findings are published Nov. 28 in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.
Rats are a unique species...
Reading rats' minds
Place cells in the hippocampus fire when we are in a certain position -- this discovery by John O'Keefe, May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser brought them the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2014. Based on which place cell fires, scientists can determine were a rat is. Neuroscientists are now able to tell where a rat...
Computers successfully trained to identify animals in photos
A computer model developed at the University of Wyoming by UW researchers and others has demonstrated remarkable accuracy and efficiency in identifying images of wild animals from camera-trap photographs in North America.
The artificial-intelligence breakthrough, detailed in a paper published in the scientific journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution, is described as a significant advancement in...
A fresh look at winter footprints: Environmental DNA improves tracking of rare carnivores
An innovative new project has discovered that animal footprints contain enough DNA to allow for species identification. Scientists have traditionally relied on snow-tracks and camera traps to monitor populations of rare carnivores, like Canada lynx, fishers and wolverines. These traditional techniques can tell part of, but not the entire story of an animal population, and...