Ecologists home in on how sperm whales find their prey
...ty's Journal of Animal Ecology, sperm whales like bats use echolocation consistently to track down their prey at depth. Working in the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico and the Ligurian Sea, scientists from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and the University of St Andrews attached acoustic recording ta...Parallel evolution: Proteins do it, too
...el of morphology---birds can fly, insects can fly, bats can fly, and they've all evolved this capability independently. But at the DNA and protein sequence level, it's very rare to find parallel evolution. This paper provides a real example," said Zhang, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary ...Vampire bats recognise their prey's breathing
...ay in the open access journal BMC Biology, vampire bats of the species Desmodus rotondus could recognise r...much better than human participants could. Vampire bats feed on the same prey over several nights and the authors of the study propose that the bats use bre...Eavesdropping fringe-lipped bats spread culture through sound
...ing the same dish the next table over, frog-eating bats learn to eat new prey by eavesdropping on their ne... Rachel Page and Mike Ryan, studying fringe-lipped bats at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute on Barro Colorado Island in Panama, found that nave b...Cultural transmission in bats: When listening for dinner, bats learn from their neighbors
...groups, the researchers measured the rate at which bats learned new foraging information: in this case, th...ial facilitation group, in which two inexperienced bats were presented with the experimental task together; and (c) a trial-and-error group, in which a sing...Bat Blitz: Media invited to learn about bats in the southeast
... look at the species composition and prevalence of bats on parts of the Sumter and Chattahoochee National ...iques for catching and recording information about bats will be demonstrated, as well as research techniques such as sampling for genetic and stable isotope...USGS at The Wildlife Society: From sea-ice change to contaminants to predators and prey
... the distribution and flight patterns of birds and bats that migrate nocturnally. Weather surveillance radar data are being analyzed to provide a broad view of spring and fall migration through the Appalachians, and to assess the response of migrants to mountain ridges or other prominent landforms. We als...What animals can tell us about hemorrhage, organ transplants and aging
...als with a lower metabolic rate. A study of birds, bats and rodents finds differences within their cells that may help explain the longer-than-expected life span of birds and bats, Kristan said. These are just two of the symposia taking place at the conference. There are plenty of fresh and interestin...Grant to UA makes Kartchner Caverns a Microbial Observatory
...s of the cave differ in how deep they are, whether bats live there, whether water is dripping, the amount of carbon dioxide present and how much visitation the area receives. So the team will collect microbes from a range of microhabitats by using the same kind of cotton swabs doctors use to collect throa...Pollinators help one-third of the world's food crop production
Berkeley -- Pollinators such as bees, birds and bats affect 35 percent of the world's food crop production, increasing the output of 87 of the leading crops worldwide, finds a new study published today (Wednesday, Oct. 25), in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences and co-authored ...Fragmentation rapidly erodes Amazonian biodiversity
...rest understory that need animals such as birds or bats to disperse their seeds and pollen. Fragmentation is also changing the dynamics and structure of the forest. Tree communities in fragments are highly unstable, losing and gaining species at a high rate. Fragments also tend to lose many of their l...Current understanding of the co-evolution of bats and moths has been thrown into question following ...gs change our understanding of the co-evolution of bats and moths and have implications for the hearing of many other animals." It has been known for over 5...To elude bats, a moth keeps its hearing in tune
...t would seem likely that by using high ultrasound, bats would make their hunting calls inaudible to moths....prisingly, the sensitivity of the moths ear to the bats calls also increases, as the moth ear dynamically becomes more sensitive to the frequencies that man...New sucker-footed bat discovered in Madagascar
...le find because the new bat belongs to a Family of bats endemic to Madagascar--and one that was previously considered to include only one rare species. The new species, Myzopoda schliemanni, occurs only in the dry western forests of Madagascar, while the previously known species, Myzopoda aurita, occurs ...Bats in flight reveal unexpected aerodynamics
...imetics, marks the first such measurements made in bats and highlights ways in which bat flight appears to... novel lift-generating mechanism may be at work in bats and point to the highly maneuverable mammals as a model for tiny flying machines. Breuer, a profess......ion of the queen bee's genes. In addition, vampire bats will spontaneously share food through regurgitation, evidently so that the favor will be returned when food sources are scarce. In humans, reciprocal arrangements depend on trust, so moral emotions, like guilt, embarrassment, resentment, and pride, ...Bones in motion: Brown scientists to create new 3-D X-ray system
...w system. "Imagine animated X-ray movies of flying bats or flexing knees. It's very cool technology that is also very important from a biomedical standpoint." The system will be designed and built with a $1.8-million grant from the W.M. Keck Foundation, one of the nation's largest philanthropic organiza...The love song of male tngara frogs
...s well as unintended receivers such as frog-eating bats and blood-sucking flies, prefer complex to simple ...calls. Bernal, Page, Rand, and Ryan tested whether bats and flies prefer complex calls because they indicate higher quality males and/or higher male density...Bats prey on nocturnally migrating songbirds
...s a control. The results elegantly showed that the bats ate only insects in summer, included some songbird...migrating passerines appears unique not only among bats but also within the whole animal kingdom. Although carnivorous bats feeding on small-sized vertebrat...Authors, illustrator win AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books
...ters on the Orinoco, snow leopards in Kashmir, and bats in Costa Rica's Monteverde cloud forest. There are encounters with wildebeest on the Serengeti, the ancient vegetation of New Caledonia, prairie dogs and bison on North America's Great Plains, and the fauna and flora (endemic and introduced) of the G...