Multi-species herbivore outbreak follows El Nio drought in Panama
...n't know how common outbreaks like this are in the tropics because people have begun to associate events like this with global climate change fairly recently," says Van Bael. What caused the outbreak? Most likely the drought kept the caterpillars' natural enemies out of play, but the exact cause will remai...'Broken' gene reveals evolution of salt retention and possible ties to hypertension
...as finding that as populations moved away from the tropics the original or normal version of the gene became less and less common and the 'broken' version more frequent, which suggests it is protective. There seems to be a strong selective advantage conferred by the non-functioning protein, and that advanta...Scientists pioneer biotech techniques to halt infestation of history, art treasures in tropics
...es with temperate weather. But the climate of the tropics and sub-tropics presents different, more complex challenges, including a huge variety of insects, bacteria and fungi that attack important sculptures, paintings, artifacts, photos, documents, records and books. Experts say climate and insect-induced ...Declining fish supply linked to wildlife consumption in West Africa, Science study reports
... interact across ecosystems. Wild animals from the tropics that are hunted for eventual human consumption are...irds and most any other wild land animal from the tropics that hunters kill and sell or consume themselves can be considered bushmeat. The multi-billion doll...Pinatubo's rivers show the danger isn't over when volcanic eruption ends
...be washed away easily. Pinatubo's location, in the tropics not far north of the equator, makes it subject to torrential rains from monsoons and typhoons. "In one of the streams we're studying, nothing can live. If a big storm hits, the whole riverbed moves," Gran said. That means that more than 13 years aft...Why does species diversity vary so much?
...ction. However, there is little evidence that the tropics contain enough extra individuals for this mechanis...ed. Something else limits richness. Finally, the tropics have been a hotbed of evolution of diversity. Could this generate observed gradients? The evidenc...El Nino forecasting could aid fisheries management, disease control, marine species protection
...ecast of where excess rains are going to be in the tropics so they can pre-deploy their resources." Finally, scientists could use the latest technological tools to assess how ENSO-caused changes in the dynamics of the oceans are likely to relocate nutrient-rich feeding zones where over-exploited or threatene...Carbon dioxide role in past climate revealed
...eam) moving greater amounts of warm water from the tropics to the polar regions. Others speculate that incre...an currents, we would expect to see cooling at the tropics and warming at the poles. Conversely, if CO2 was the cause then we would expect both the tropics an...Currents could disrupt ocean food chain
... current, which drags warm water from the southern tropics into the North Atlantic and warms Europe, will be disrupted. Rather, his study is one of the first to examine what would happen to the ocean food chain if such a disruption did take place. "Phytoplankton are the basis of the entire marine food web,"...Ancient DNA confirms single origin of Malagasy primates
...ts that prospects for ancient DNA studies from the tropics are less promising than those from higher latitudes, but when the results are potentially of such compelling interest, it's always worth a try," she said....Research finds a mechanistic explanation for global patterns of liana abundance and distribution
...in lianas along the latitudinal gradient, from the tropics northward, and the clumped distribution of lianas at the local, within-forest scale. This researcj explains both the patterns of abundance and distribution of an important group of plants, as well as provides a framework that can be used to predict ...Warming most evident at high latitudes, but greatest impact will be in tropics
..., Tewksbury said. That is because organisms in the tropics normally do not experience much temperature variat...with more seasonal climates. "Temperatures in the tropics don't fluctuate that much, so the relatively small temperature shifts predicted by climate change mo...Scientists must offer solutions for conserving tropical forests in a rapidly changing world
... underway" writes ecologist S. Joseph Wright, "The tropics support over half of all species and over two-thirds of all people. Without an appropriate commitment from the scientific community, the two are unlikely to continue to coexist," concludes the scientist. Tropical forest landscapes are changing rapidl...NSF, NIH award Ecology of Infectious Diseases grants
...led Buruli ulcer, a serious disease throughout the tropics that may result from human changes to the landscape, via aquatic invertebrates that bite humans and that live in slow-flowing or stagnating aquatic habitats...Same-sex mating by fungi spawned infection outbreak, evidence suggests
...Cryptococcus gattii, is normally restricted to the tropics and subtropics. The researchers said their findings provide important additional insight into the origin of the Vancouver Island outbreak, which began in 1999. Moreover, the evidence that sex played an important role in the pathogen's expansion may p...Tropical dry forests receive international recognition
...sts once made up 42 per cent of all forests in the tropics yet less than one per cent is protected. The most diverse tropical dry forests exist in southern Mexico and the Bolivian lowlands and the level of endemism--species unique to that area--is higher than in rainforests. Half of Costa Rica's dry forests ...Why the Amazon rainforest is so rich in species
...d supposedly to periods of profound drought in the tropics generally, and in the Amazon basin particularly. F...o evolve into multiple species yet, whereas in the tropics the climate changes were less severe and so older species survived, and rapidly evolving groups were...Extinctions linked to climate change
...ease of humans, is increasing its range out of the tropics and is now found in parts of the southern United States. And predicting how climate change will favor a certain pathogen or disease transmission is extremely difficult. "We should expect the unexpected," Blaustein and Andy Dobson of Princeton Univers...Climate change drives widespread amphibian extinctions
...red harlequin frogs once lived near streams in the tropics of Central and South America, but about two-thirds vanished in the 1980s and 1990s. In the famed Costa Rican cloud forests, for example, the Monteverde harlequin frog disappeared in the late 1980s, as did the golden toad, whose much-publicized extinc...Global warming drives epidemic disease wiping out amphibian populations
...s. Between 1975 and 2000, air temperature for the tropics increased by 0.18 degrees per decade, triple the average rate of warming for the 20th Century. That warming, the paper argues, has reduced mist frequency at Monteverde by raising the heights of cloud formation which may promote the survival, growth a...