Fossils reveal direct link between global warming and genetic diversity in wildlife
...adly said. That's because voles routinely look for mates from other colonies. "Voles move around," Hadly noted. "They disperse quite freely, and that actually results in an elevation of genetic diversity during the time that their population sizes are undergoing reduction. Pocket gophers, on the other hand...Essential smell gene may provide key to new insect repellents
Insects navigate by smell to find food, mates and -- in the case of disease-spreading mosquitoes -- humans to bite. Researchers at Rockefeller University report in the September 2 issue of Neuron that insects' ability to detect odors depends on a single gene. Fruit flies lacking the gene, known ...Nevada researcher re-ignites mammal reproduction debate
...ions because males that are unsuccessful in having mates have few offspring while most females breed throughout their lifetime." The problem with this idea is that, until now, only about 30-percent of studies have supported the hypothesis, which has been debated because there have been so many studies tha...Social benefits of wound healing may not make any difference in animals with multiple partners
... suggests that wounds on mice that prefer multiple mates heal at the same rate, whether the mice are housed with a mate or live in isolation. But the same doesn't ring true for monogamous mice, said Courtney DeVries, an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Ohio State University. Sh......ial? What sets Kaitlin Sandeno apart from her swim mates in the 800-meter freestyle? What nuances of form did Klete Keller recently use to close in on Ian Thorpe's world record in the 400-meter freestyle? The answer: skill, a lot of practice, and in some cases, a little help from some high-tech biomedical...DNA tests point to extinction of 2 distinctive arctic bird populations
...feathers, providing instant camouflage, once their mates have begun laying eggs and this camouflage is reversible if the female loses her eggs or is unable to fertilize them....Yale scientists decipher odor code
..., a process that is essential to identifying food, mates and predators. Graduate student Elissa Hallem and her advisor John Carlson, professor in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology at Yale University, systematically tested the odor receptor proteins in the fruit fly antenna and...Researchers make promiscuous animals monogamous by manipulating genes
...ole, the promiscuous meadow vole, which frequently mates with multiple partners, lacks vasopressin receptors in the ventral pallidum. The scientists used a harmless virus to transfer the vasopressin receptor gene from prairie voles into the ventral pallidum of meadow voles, which increased vasopressin rec...Espionage may have driven the evolution of bee language according to UCSD-led study in Brazil
...two main forms of communication to tell their hive mates where to find food: abstract representations such as sounds or dances within the hive or scent markings outside the hive to mark the food and/or the route to it. In 1999, James Nieh, an assistant professor of biology at UCSD, published a paper in wh...For a male sand goby, playing 'Mr. Mom' is key to female's heart
...erpreted as combining the twin goals of attracting mates and parenting, she said. Although the experiments show that males improve their parental duties in response to the presence of females, the studies don't indicate whether it actually pays off in terms of wooing females to mate. St. Mary and her coll...Familiarity decides if wolf spider loves 'em or eats 'em
...cientist has found that female wolf spiders prefer mates that are comfortably familiar. However, the resear... ornamentation, since exposed females are choosing mates versus meals." Hebets said that cannibalization rates among unfamiliar males are higher than she fou...Are the bright colors of some avian eggs signaling female genetic quality to their mates?
...ls of the laying females' genetic quality to their mates in order to induce them to work harder for offspring that will inherit the advertised traits. According to modern theories of sexual selection, signals have to be costly to be reliable and evolve. The blue-green pigment biliverdin is a potent antiox...Discovery may help in war against fire ants
...d male Strepsitera emerges from the ant, finds and mates with a female. She develops up to 800,000 eggs and lays live young, which emerge from the female to start the cycle all over again. The research gets to a fundamental problem, Johnston said. "How does a parasite attack whether it is you or I or any...Male pregnancy in seahorses may affect formation of new species
...onogamy, Jones said. Seahorses choose similar-size mates to have the best chances for successful reproduction. The female inserts ripe eggs into the males brood pouch, where the eggs are fertilized, embed and incubate for 10 days to six weeks, depending on the species. Male reproductive rates, the size...Fast changing gene drives species split
...er and three close relatives. When D. melanogaster mates with these related species, which separated only two million to three million years ago, female offspring are sterile and male offspring die. Barbash and colleagues isolated and compared the Hmr genes from the different flies and found that they were...Tufts University biologists unveil more mysteries of fireflies flash
... way the flash codes help males to court potential mates of their own species. Lewis said that male firef...ts the success of fertilization. A female firefly mates with multiple males, but she controls the number of eggs that each male will fertilize. Competition...New book entertainingly tells 'What Good Are Bugs'
... bores in the wood, feeds on the bark of twigs and mates on branches and trunks, weakening and often killing their hosts. To explain how insects feed plants, he uses a boyhood experience. After finding a leaf with many shiny, glimmering spots full of stuck insects, his high-school biology teacher in Conne...Mathematical models reveal 'molten' and 'glassy' states of RNA
...n connect with many different mates to form many possible overall shapes. In the glassy state, the strand "freezes" in a random pattern. The results hold implications for the study of the related "protein folding problem."...Sex and gender scientists explore a revolution in evolution
...ales are ''coy,'' mating rarely and choosing their mates carefully, presumably betting their odds on the males with the best genes to contribute to their offspring. For their part, males are ''ardent'' and promiscuous, and fight amongst themselves for female partners. Later theories added that males are pr......andy way for certain mammals to identify potential mates (and may also help mice get around the fact that they look pretty much alike). These findings may also open the way to a better understanding of how animals communicate dominance, mating receptivity, and individuality, according to Katz and his coaut...