Yearly Archives: 2018

Scientists have shown that a bird found in Pennsylvania is the offspring of a hybrid warbler mother and a warbler father from an entirely different genus -- a combination never recorded before now and which resulted in a three-species hybrid bird. This finding has just been published in the journal Biology Letters.

For the nearly 35 million Americans who faithfully stock their feeders to attract songbirds, an increasingly common sight is a hawk feeding on the birds being fed.

Sixty-nine pharmaceutical compounds have been detected in stream insects, some at concentrations that may threaten animals that feed on them, such as trout and platypus. When these insects emerge as flying adults, they can pass drugs to spiders, birds, bats, and other streamside foragers. These findings by an international team of researchers were published today...

Moths are a mainstay food source for bats, which use echolocation (biological sonar) to hunt their prey. Scientists such as Thomas Neil, from the University of Bristol in the U.K., are studying how moths have evolved passive defenses over millions of years to resist their primary predators.

Active sensors are incorporated into a number of technologies, such as meteorology devices and self-driving cars, and use the echo from sound, radio or light waves to locate objects. But despite nearly a century of development, these active sensing technologies still fail to replicate the performance of sonars (sound waves) used in the biological world...

Humpback whales bear stark battle scars from violent encounters with orcas, also known as killer whales. Analysis of rake marks on more than 3000 humpback whale tails or flukes suggest that attacks on these undersea giants may be on the rise, according to a new study in Endangered Species Research.