Category: Plants & Animals
-
Ants On Strike Against Global Warming
If the temperature increases by just a half a degree Celsius, the most important seed-dispersing ants basically shut down. They do not go out and forage and do the things they normally do.
-
Rules Of Successful Polination: Right Flower, Right Pollinator, Right Nectar Recipe
When it comes to drinking nectar, the most important factor is whether the insects dip their tongue in, or whether they suck the liquid up.
-
Rat Uses Plant Poisons To Defend Against Lions
The deadly secret of a rat that kills lions and jackals has at last been revealed. Unlike some mammals that produce their own toxins, the African crested rat is the first known to protect itself by daubing its fur with poisons from plants.
-
Government Enlists Toucans To Study Seed Dispersal
Nutmeg-loving toucans wearing GPS transmitters recently helped a team of scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama address an age-old problem in plant ecology: accurately estimating seed dispersal.
-
Leaves As Sonar Reflectors To Aid Bat Pollination
We have looked at two [bat-pollinated plants] and found amazing things. We are expecting to find many more. I think the acoustic world out there is just waiting for us.
-
Flowers Help Long-tongue Flies Help Flowers
Flowers that are pollinated by long-tongued flies do tend to have similar striking marks, even though they can hail from distant families visual guides might be especially important to these insects, which need something to help them aim their long, unwieldy tongues.
-
It takes (at least) two: why mutualism and conservation go hand in hand
Apportioning conservation resources to a single species based on rarity or species traits, for example, may have little conservation value if one or more of its mutualists are not also preserved.
-
Crafty island plants use lizards to disperse their seeds
Lizards eat fruits? Well, they do on some islands, where food is scarce. But instead of being threatened by this, the crafty plants have evolved to rely on the lizards to disperse their seeds into unoccupied areas
-
Parasitic wasp larvae interfere with each other via their host’s host plant
So although this result shows that one parasitoid wasp can reach out and influence another through three other organisms
-
Endangered Amazon Fish A Forest Savior
The Amazon's big fish poop seeds far from where they eat fruit, helping to maintain the genetic diversity of the tropical forest, according to new research that shines light on a little-studied mechanism of seed dispersal.