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From humans to crocodiles, many creatures tend to their young. “But we actually understand very little about how the bra...
24/10/2022

From humans to crocodiles, many creatures tend to their young. “But we actually understand very little about how the brain makes parental behaviors,” says Eva Fischer, a neuroethologist at Stanford University.

To study how such care is wired into the amphibian brain, Fischer and her colleagues looked at neural activity in three poison dart frog species with different parenting strategies: Dendrobates tinctorius, among whom the males take care of the young; Oophaga sylvatica, whose females do the parenting; and Ranitomeya imitator, whose offspring are cared for by a monogamous male and female pair.

Most frogs lay oodles of eggs and quickly hop away. But some poison dart frogs baby their offspring, cleaning and hydrat...
24/10/2022

Most frogs lay oodles of eggs and quickly hop away. But some poison dart frogs baby their offspring, cleaning and hydrating eggs laid on land and piggybacking hatched tadpoles to water.

A peek inside the brains of these nurturing amphibians reveals that in males and females, two regions linked with caring for young are the same — a finding that may provide clues to the neural underpinnings of parental behavior, researchers report online July 17 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Those unburnt refuges are where animals can shelter from flames and eventually start repopulating surrounding burnt regi...
20/10/2022

Those unburnt refuges are where animals can shelter from flames and eventually start repopulating surrounding burnt regions, preventing local extinctions, Ritchie and his colleagues reported in 2013 in the Journal of Applied Ecology. Surviving patches are also an important source of plants and seeds for revegetation.

But the intensity of fires this summer may mean “there will be far fewer refuge areas within burnt areas than is typical, or they may be too small to support viable populations of species,” Woinarski says.

The problem of too-frequent fires depleting soil seed banks is not unique to Australia. A study published in 2004 looked...
20/10/2022

The problem of too-frequent fires depleting soil seed banks is not unique to Australia. A study published in 2004 looked at the impact of fires passing through the chaparral ecosystems of California’s Santa Monica Mountains more than every six years. Some species that usually resprouted following fires began to diminish, leading to a thinning of the shrubby ecosystem and the invasion of nonnative grasses.

Islands of greenery
The severity of Australia’s ongoing fires may cause other problems, too.

Normally when fires sweep through, they leave some patches unburnt by fluke or because of the topography of the landscape. “Those unburnt patches are really important for recolonizing of plant and animal species, back to the burnt landscape, as it is regrowing,” Woinarski says.

As mussels grow their first shells and become juveniles, they swell to the size of a well-fed deer tick, then drop from ...
16/10/2022

As mussels grow their first shells and become juveniles, they swell to the size of a well-fed deer tick, then drop from the fish. For each species of mussel, there’s often only one — or at most, a few — species of fish that can ferry larvae to the next stage of life.

Mussels have evolved a staggering array of methods for infesting fish; almost all involve deception. Some mussels disguise their glochidia in alluring packages that look like minnows; others unspool wormlike appendages tipped with packets holding millions of larvae. The rainbow mussel (Villosa iris) has a lure that looks like a crawfish skittering along the river floor. When a fish tries to eat the minnow or worm or crawfish, the fish gets a mouthful of glochidia, released like dandelion seeds. With the fish’s next gulp of water, the glochidia wash over the gills and stick.

In the wild, black imported fire ants (Solenopsis richteri) typically eat honeydew produced by aphids. In the lab, entom...
13/10/2022

In the wild, black imported fire ants (Solenopsis richteri) typically eat honeydew produced by aphids. In the lab, entomologist Jian Chen of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service in Stoneville, Miss., and colleagues provided the ants with containers of sugary water. The insects have a hard, water-repellent outer covering called a cuticle, and can typically float on a liquid — and sure enough, the insects floated and fed without a problem.

Leaks in mitochondria — the energy-generating part of cells — generate extra heat and cause sea otters’ extreme metaboli...
11/10/2022

Leaks in mitochondria — the energy-generating part of cells — generate extra heat and cause sea otters’ extreme metabolism, the researchers found. Metabolism describes how food gets converted into energy in cells. Mitochondria pump protons across their inner membrane to store energy that can be used to power the cell. But if those protons leak back over the membrane before being used for work, that energy is lost as heat. Because these proton leaks increase the amount of energy lost as heat, otters need to eat more food to make up for that lost energy, revving up their metabolism.

Other mammals — including extremely small mice with high metabolisms — can also generate heat this way. But sea otters are much better at it: These proton leaks account for about 40 percent of otters’ muscle cells’ total respiratory capacity, higher than any known mammal except those tiny mice. Producing heat this way helps the animals stay comfortable in 0° C Pacific waters. “That message is loud and clear, and just brilliant,” Williams says.

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