A Goffin’s cockatoo (Cacatua goffiniana) named Figaro has been observed spontaneously making and using tools for reaching food and other objects. Figaro, who lives in Vienna, was reared in captivity and animal behaviorists are unclear as to how he acquired his DIY skills. The researchers that documented his tool making abilities, from the Universities of […]
Rising before daylight and perched on a bench at his Sauk County shack in Depression-era Wisconsin, pioneering wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold (pictured) routinely took notes on the dawn chorus of birds. Beginning with the first pre-dawn calls of the indigo bunting or robin, Leopold would jot down the bird songs he heard, when he heard […]
The obsessive thieving and stashing of seeds by rodents provides a vital seed-dispersal service in tropical forests, say scientists whose research may solve a long standing puzzle in ecology. The new findings are based on research conducted in Panama and appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The mystery stems from […]
For the first time, scientists have isolated individual magnetic cells in trout that the fish use to help them navigate back to their hatching ground. This latest discovery may shed light on how other creatures, including humans, are influenced by magnetic fields. Researcher Michael Winklhofer, from Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich), explained that while the magnetic […]
Using high speed video, researchers from Georgia Tech have observed how mosquitoes can fly through rain even though a single raindrop can weigh 50 times more than the insect. According to lead researcher David Hu, the technique of yielding to an incoming attack, rather than attempting to meet it with opposing force, enables the bugs […]
Birds and dinosaurs are more closely related than previously thought, say scientists who claim that modern birds are, essentially, living juvenile dinosaurs. According to Harvard’s Arkhat Abzhanov, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the evolution of birds is the result of a drastic change in how dinosaurs developed. Rather than taking years to reach […]
One of the longest ecological interaction chains ever documented sheds light on how human disturbance of the natural world may lead to widespread, yet largely invisible, disruption of ecosystems. The research, by Stanford scientists Douglas McCauley and Paul DeSalles, appears in the journal Scientific Reports. McCauley and DeSalles were working around the remote Palmyra Atoll […]
Scientists using very high resolution satellite images to estimate penguin populations around the coastline of Antarctica were surprised to find there were twice as many emperor penguins as previously thought. The results, published in the journal PLoS ONE, provide an important benchmark for monitoring the impact of environmental change on the population of this famous […]
Up until the Cambrian Period, it was understood that animals were soft bodied and had no hard parts, but paleontologists say they have discovered fossil evidence for an organism with individual skeletal body parts that appearsbefore the Cambrian. The researchers, from the University of California, Riverside, made the discovery in Australia. The creature, called Coronacollina […]
One-in-20 honey bees are thrill seekers, say University of Illinois entomologists who have identified distinct patterns of gene activity in the same molecular pathways known to be associated with thrill-seeking in humans. Their study, published in Science, suggests that thrill-seeking is not limited to humans and other vertebrates and that novelty seeking is an important […]
