Yearly Archives: 2018

Are fire ants worse this spring because of Hurricane Harvey?

Rice University ecologists are checking to see if Hurricane Harvey's unprecedented floods gave a competitive boost to fire ants and crazy ants, two of southeast Texas' least favorite uninvited guests.

Extreme weather events like Harvey are expected to become more likely as Earth's climate changes due to greenhouse gas emissions, and scientists don't understand how extreme...

Read more

Why are whales so big?

Anyone who has witnessed majestic whales or lumbering elephant seals in person would be forgiven for associating ocean life with unlimited size in mammals, but new research reveals that mammal growth is actually more constrained in water than on land.

This finding by Stanford researchers is in contrast to previous theories suggesting that pressure on body...

Read more

What three feet of seawater could mean for the world's turtles

Ninety percent of the world's coastal freshwater turtle species are expected to be affected by sea level rise by 2100, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.

The study, published in Early View online today in the journal Biological Reviews, is the first comprehensive global assessment of freshwater turtles that frequent brackish, or...

Read more

Vampire bat immunity and infection risk respond to livestock rearing

The availability of livestock as a food source for vampire bats influences their immune response and infection by bacterial pathogens, according to a new paper in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Because cattle ranching is common in areas where the bats live, the findings have implications for human as well as animal health.

The...

Read more

First IVF bison calf joins wild herd

And then there were... 44. Eight bison -- four calves and their mothers -- were released in mid-March on public lands in northern Colorado, bringing the total number of animals in the Laramie Foothills Bison Conservation Herd to 44.

A 10-month-old calf known as IVF 1 was among the newcomers. She is the first bison calf...

Read more