A puzzle posed by black-headed ducks yields to persistent biologists
... hard work of parenting for them. The black-headed duck of South America is one of these, but it stands ou...nd cowbirds. Instead, they found that black-headed duck eggs are often rejected from host nests, and it took four years of detailed field research to figure...Earliest embryos ever discovered provide clues to dinosaur evolution, parenting: Study
...e articulated embryos in the Late Cretaceous, like duck bill dinosaurs and theropods, but those are at least 100 million years younger." According to Reisz, what makes this discovery particularly significant is the ability to put the embryos into a growth series and work out for the first time how these...Molecular mechanism of feather formation found
...rs. Termed pennaceous, these feathers occur in the duck and other birds, including adult chickens, and are not characterized as downy. The more primitive young chicken feathers, which are downy, are called plumalaceous. "We don't have empirical evidence for this yet, but mathematical analyses lead us to ...CU's Torres discusses avian flu and policy
...pread in Asia in backyard and low-tech poultry and duck production areas where people transport infected chickens atop cars or on motorbikes to markets. There, sick birds can infect other birds that then return home unsold. Also, people who handle uncooked meat and infected birds can spread the flu virus ...Early California: A killing field
...ound only in open water and on the outer coast, as duck populations lessened on land and in marshes. After depleting larger shorebirds marbled godwits, long-billed curlews, and whimbrels natives then hunted smaller shorebirds such as sandpipers. Broughton's conclusion that hunting by native peoples dep...USGS at The Wildlife Society: From sea-ice change to contaminants to predators and prey
... Sept. 26, 10:30-10:50 a.m. Food of surf scoter duck possibly linked to abundance of oyster bars in Chesapeake Bay: Reports of the Atlantic coast surf scoter (Melanitta perspicillata) populations have indicated steady declines in recent decades, which have necessitated further research on their popu...UGA study identifies North American wild bird species that could transmit bird flu
...eorgia researchers have found that the common wood duck and laughing gull are very susceptible to highly p...birds, it would really pay to investigate any wood duck deaths because they seem to be highly susceptible, as are laughing gulls," said Stallknecht, a membe...Is biodiversity the future of farming?
...'s duck/fish/rice/fruit farm in Japan. He produces duck meat, duck eggs, fish meat, fruit, and rice without any purchased outside inputs, using a highly synergistic sy...Robotic cameras join search for 'Holy Grail of bird-watching'
...hers and environmentalists to Arkansas farmers and duck hunters. In the meantime, the new robotic video system provides detailed video sequences of other birds, suggesting a new high-tech approach to doing field biology work. Ken Goldberg, a UC Berkeley professor of industrial engineering and operatio...Virtual duck bills demonstrate species coexistence
... me to create exact, three-dimensional replicas of duck bills complete with articulating joints" said Gurd...as allowed me to determine the particle sizes each duck could ingest and the rate at which they could ingest them." D. Brent Gurd, "Predicting resource pa...'War Between the Sexes': The coevolution of genitalia in waterfowl
...hem, and vice versa. What happens when a female duck wants to mate with its chosen partner? The authors speculate that these physical barriers are easily overcome when females cooperate during copulation, and that they only function to exclude unwanted advances. Brennan is pursuing these results wit...