City birds prefer rich neighbors
...rm Ecological Research Project has found that the bird population has a slightly higher species richness ... choose to live. The study's results indicate that bird populations are influenced by economic factors -- more species live in wealthy neighborhoods than in...Plant detectives seek sources of invasive trees
...oss of native plants also decreases the insect and bird biodiversity. Schaal's graduate student, John Gaskin, has used DNA sequences to identify which species are here and to document hybridization. Their DNA analyses also help them pinpoint where the plants may have originated in Eurasia. Earlier USDA ...US Women scientists from Latin America to encourage colleagues from south
... But her parents disagreed. It was as if a newborn bird had been put in a cage with kangaroos, she said of her efforts to study mathematicsher parents choice. I was strong enough to move toward what I wanted, rather than doing what my parents wanted me to do. I believe that my story might help some of the...UCI Samueli School researchers to study wetlands impact on coastal water quality
..." In recent research, Grant and Sanders found that bird droppings in the Talbert Marsh contributed fecal matter to coastal Huntington Beach where high bacteria levels have led to numerous beach postings over the past three years. "We want to know if our results at Talbert Marsh are unique to that one loca...Scientist says ostrich study confirms bird 'hands' unlike those of dinosaurs
...inosaurs were ancestors of modern birds. How can a bird hand, for example, with digits two, three and four...results," he said. "Questions about development of bird hands were first addressed in 1821 by the famous German physician and anatomist Johann Friedrich Mec...Flawed sampling, not just pollution, may be responsible for beach closings
...y, they published a paper uncovering evidence that bird droppings in a nearby wetland contributed fecal matter to Huntington Beach, raising the levels of hazardous bacteria in the water. Those findings contradict a longstanding belief that wetlands filter out pollutants. The researchers recently received ...Songbird population declines linked to acid rain
... acid-rain regions similarly have linked declining bird populations to acid-rain-induced depletion of soil...the wood thrush by predicting the probability of a bird attempting to breed at a given location, based on the amount of acid rain falling there. First they ...Worlds largest rain forest national park created in Northern Amazon
...sts forever." At least eight primate species, 350 bird species and 37 lizard species live in these forests. Among these are several species with declining populations in other parts of their ranges, including the jaguar, giant anteater, giant armadillo, harpy eagle, the black spider monkey, the brown-bea...A mane is a pain, but worth it for male lions
...changes, things like lion manes, the brightness of bird plumage and the size of deer antlers may be sensitive bioindicators," Packer said. "They can tell you how well an animal is doing in the environment."...A unique hemoglobin may help the baby kangaroo's journey to the mothers pouch
...acid sequence has been shown to be more similar to bird and reptile globins than to any mammalian globin. Phylogenetic studies have shown that it is descended from a globin that split off from other globins before the bird-mammal evolutionary divergence over 300 million years ago. The gene for this globin...LSU part of national Tree of Life effort
...hannon Hackett, who received her Ph.D. training in bird genetics at LSU. The other group working on the p...possesses the world's largest collection of frozen bird tissues for genetic research, and the museum's curators are nationally recognized experts in bird ev...Dinosaur ancestor's vision possibly nocturnal
...ectrum, it is closest to the spectrum measured for bird rhodopsins." The final piece of evidence that the researchers had produced a functional rhodopsin was that the activated form of rhodopsin triggered the rest of the signal transduction cascade in the photoreceptor cell; in other words, it interacted ...Songbirds use mental pointer when playing tunes
...sed than cellist Yo-Yo Ma's chamber music, but the bird even keeps its "finger" on its mental sheet music both day and night. In a National Science Foundation (NSF) supported study atLucent Technology's Bell Laboratories, researchers have discovered that signals serving as "mental pointers" are produced...Ecological significance of tool-use in the woodpecker finch Cactospiza pallida
...study on the ecological relevance of tool-use by a bird species. Woodpecker finches hardly use tools in humid areas where food is abundant and easily accessible. In contrast, in arid coastal areas where food is scarce, Woodpecker finches rely almost exclusively on the extraction of food from bark and tre...Neighborhood socioeconomic status affects diversity of birds in parks, study finds
...nomic areas are likely to see a wider diversity of bird species in their parks, according to Paige S. Warr...p between socioeconomic level and the diversity of bird populations in urban neighborhood parks. Their work is part of the Central Arizona-Phoenix Long Ter...Male birds' ability to learn song affects female mating response
...ned the song as well." In addition to insight into bird song, said Nowicki, such studies can give basic in...erlie the expression of that trait. In the case of bird song, a male's song reflects the birds' developmental history, and song expression is only the trait...After massive experiment, results favor wildlife corridors
...t. The researchers then placed seed traps under 16 bird perches built in each of the connected and unconne... months, they collected and analyzed the resulting bird droppings in a lab. Given the grand scale of the experiment, the work was not without difficulties. ...Wildlife corridors shown effective
... with a fluorescent dye powder. The examination of bird droppings showed that the holly and wax myrtle seed was dispersed in higher rates to the connected patch than to isolated patches. "Not only have we shown that corridors affect movement rates, but we've also shown how plants and animals interact in t...Science picks leads, feeds and story seeds (October 2002 edition)
...e the virus to their winter homes and infect local bird and mosquito populations there. For more information, visit http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/research/west_nile/west_nile.html . Butch Kinerney ( bkinerney@usgs.gov ) 703-648-4460 Taking a Snapshot of "How Clean is My Water?" On October 18, 2002, 30 years...NASA researchers developing tools to help track and predict West Nile Virus
...ion-wide temperatures, distributions ofvegetation, bird migration routes and areas pinpointingreported cas...then be combined with surveysof infected birds and bird migration paths, obtained fromradio transmitters placed on birds, to create temporal andspatial risk...