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...
Blood-sucking flies have been spreading malaria for 100 million years
The microorganisms that cause malaria, leishmaniasis and a variety of other illnesses today can be traced back at least to the time of dinosaurs, a study of amber-preserved blood-sucking insects and ticks show.
In addition to demonstrating the antiquity of vectors and their long-term association with parasitic microorganisms, the findings are remarkable for several reasons.
First, bloodsuckers...
How water fleas detect predators
Water fleas of the genus Daphnia detect via chemical substances if their predators, namely Chaoborus larvae, are hunting in their vicinity. If so, they generate defences that make them more difficult to consume. The signalling molecules that enable detection have been identified by biologists and chemists from Ruhr-Universität Bochum, the University of Duisburg-Essen and the...