Showing posts with the label
Biodiversity
Species that live in symbiosis with others, which often occur in the most delicately balanced and threatened marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, are the slowest to recover their diversity if damag…
Earth is enduring a mass species extinction, scientists say -- the first since the demise of the dinosaurs and only the sixth in half-a-billion years. Orangutans in Borneo are just one of the world&#…
Up to half of plant and animal species in the world's most naturally rich areas, such as the Amazon and the Galapagos, could face local extinction by the turn of the century due to climate change…
About 2 to 3 million years ago, a group of spiders let out long silk threads into the wind and set sail, so to speak, across the Pacific Ocean to Hawaii. These spiders were parasites of other spiders…
Rainforest loss is fuelling a tsunami of tropical species extinctions. However, not all is doom and gloom. A new study, conducted in the Brazilian Amazon, suggests that ecological cataclysms prompted…
The tropical rainforests of Central and South America are home to the largest diversity of plants on this planet. Nowhere else are there quite so many different plant species in one place. However, t…
Lizards have special superpowers. While birds can regrow feathers and mammals can regrow skin, lizards can regenerate entire structures such as their tails. Despite these differences, all have evolve…
New research shows that males and females of the same species can evolve to be so different that they prevent other species from evolving or colonising habitats, challenging long-held theories on the…
New research shows that the loss of biodiversity can increase the risk of "extinction cascades," where an initial species loss leads to a domino effect of further extinctions. Credit: Andre…
For hundreds of years, butterfly collecting has often inspired a special kind of fanaticism, spurring lengthy expeditions, sparking rivalries and prompting some collectors to risk their fortunes and …
A team of scientists led by WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society) has developed a conservation blueprint to protect one of the most biodiverse regions in Africa: the Albertine Rift, home to mountain an…
When simulating future environmental conditions researchers face a problem: laboratory experiments are easy to control and to reproduce, but are insufficient to mimic the complexity of natural ecosys…
A recent study published in the Journal of Mammalogy , at Oxford University Press, highlights that over 1000 new species of mammals have been described globally during the last dozen years, a finding…
Imagine your hometown or city's entire population had to live on just one tenth of the land it used to—essentials like food and shelter would quickly go scarce, and it'd be just about impossi…
An international team of scientists has mapped the evolutionary relationships between China's 30,000 flowering plant species, uncovering a distinct regional pattern in biodiversity. Eastern China…
