Category: Plants & Animals
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Zombie Ants Created By Fungus!
Four new species of fungus have been discovered which infect carpenter ants, turning their victims into
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Invasive Plants A Boon To Bird Diversity
We wondered: Are we sometimes doing more harm than good when we eradicate plants that, despite being introduced recently, have formed positive relationships with native animals?
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Grizzlies Starve When Climate Change Kills Pines
We have seen the demise of one of the key food sources for the population in the form of the whitebark pine, the seed cones. While it is one of sort of four pillars of the grizzly bear nutrition source in the Yellowstone ecosystem, in many ways it was extremely important and perhaps more important than many others.
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Fish Feed On Forests
Zooplankton are one of the pillars of the aquatic food web. And while they do feed on algae, they also rely on materials derived from maple leaves, pine needles, and whatever else comes in from the surrounding watershed.
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Pitcher Plant Provides Safe Haven For Bat Naps
The bat and the plant, an elongated variety of Nepenthes rafflesiana, may have evolved a nitrogen-for-naps trade in a loose mutualism.
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Plants Adjust Flower Color To Aid Easily Confused Pollinators
Where Phlox drummondii lives by itself, it has a periwinkle blue blossom. But where its range overlaps with Phlox cuspidata, which is also light blue, drummondii flowers appear darker and more red.
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Not All Eucalypts Are The Same To A Koala
Our approach can aid ecologists in tracking and examining the presence or absence of animal populations in different areas — and it can measure plants' susceptibility to herbivory — by determining the quality and value of a habitat from the herbivore's point of view.
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Regurgitating For Self Sufficiency
The umbrellabirds also regurgitate seeds they've brought from various locations at lek sites, a practice that appears to create the dense clumps of genetically diverse fruit trees they need for food, shelter, and reproduction
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How Vulnerable Are Mutualists?
Because every species is involved directly or indirectly in mutualistic partnerships and mutualists act as key players in global carbon and nutrient cycles, pollination and seed dispersal, the breakdown of those relationships could accelerate and worsen effects of global change on biodiversity loss and ecosystem disruption.
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What Habitats Owe To The Under-celebrated Peccary
New research on the peccary is proving just how vital these species are to the world's greatest rainforest. As seed dispersers and seed destroyers, engineers of freshwater habitats and forest gaps, peccaries play an immense, long overlooked, role in the rainforest.