PhysOrg

A team of researchers from Universidad de Granada and Estación Experimental de Zonas Áridas, both in Spain, has found that male hoopoes provide more nourishment to female mates who paint their eggs well. In their paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes their study of hoopoes in the wild. View the full article

In southern Iraq, putrid water gushes out of waste pipes into marshes reputed to be home to the biblical Garden of Eden, threatening an already fragile world heritage site. View the full article

When investigators in the UK recorded the calls of migratory birds called thrushes at night, they found that call rates were up to five times higher over the brightest urban areas compared with darker villages. View the full article

A California condor egg has hatched in Northern California's wild, the newest member of Pinnacles National Park's recovery program for the endangered species. View the full article

Massachusetts has installed solar panels faster than almost any other state as it seeks to reduce its carbon emissions. But some activists say the state's transition to renewable energy has come at a cost. View the full article

White-sand savannas are expanding in the heart of the Amazon as a result of recurring forest fires, according to a study published in the journal Ecosystems. View the full article

Migratory waterbirds are particularly exposed to the effects of climate change at their breeding areas in the High Arctic and in Africa, according to a new study published in Bird Conservation International. The research team came to this conclusion after modeling climatic and hydrological conditions under current and future climate scenarios (in 2050) and comparing the impact on the distribution of 197 of the 255 waterbird species listed under the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA). The international team was led by Wetlands International, BirdLife International, and the British Trust for Ornithology, involved researchers from various universities, including McGill. The results suggest that investing more in habitat conservation in the wider landscape, in addition to the conservation of managed protected areas, is urgently needed to help migratory waterbirds adapt to the impacts of climate change. View the full article

Constantina Theofanopoulou wanted to study oxytocin. Her graduate work had focused on how the hormone influences human speech development, and now she was preparing to use those findings to investigate how songbirds learn to sing. The problem was that birds do not have oxytocin. Or so she was told. View the full article

The Vertebrate Genomes Project (VGP) today announces their flagship study and associated publications focused on genome assembly quality and standardization for the field of genomics. This study includes 16 diploid high-quality, near error-free, and near complete vertebrate reference genome assemblies for species across all taxa with backbones (i.e., mammals, amphibians, birds, reptiles, and fishes) from five years of piloting the first phase of the VGP project. View the full article

The foraging behavior of seabirds is dramatically affected by turbulence caused by natural coastal features and manmade ocean structures, new research has shown. View the full article

Powered flight in animals—that uses flapping wings to generate thrus—is a very energetically demanding mode of locomotion that requires many anatomical and physiological adaptations. In fact, the capability to develop it has only appeared four times in the evolutionary history of animals: On insects, pterosaurs, birds and bats. View the full article

Rewilding—a hands-off approach to restoring and protecting biodiversity—is increasingly employed around the globe to combat the environmental footprint of rapid urbanization and intensive farming. The recent reintroduction of gray wolves in Yellowstone, America's first national park, is regarded as one of the most successful rewilding efforts, having reinvigorated an ecosystem that had been destabilized by the removal of large predators. View the full article

House finches are locked in a deadly cycle of immunity and new strains of bacterial infection in battling an eye disease that halved their population when it first emerged 25 years ago, according to new research from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. View the full article

Golden eagles strike a cutting visage that, to put it mildly, grants the species an aura of regality. Occupying much of the Northern Hemisphere, many cultures view this species as a sacred messenger of the gods and kings and queens of the sky. View the full article

It's a common sight: pelicans gliding along the waves, right by the shore. These birds make this kind of surfing look effortless, but actually the physics involved that give them a big boost are not simple. View the full article

Scientists have provided the first evidence to show that eradicating rats from tropical islands effects not just the biodiversity on the islands, but also the fragile coral seas that surround them. View the full article

A social behavior known as the "audience effect" has long been reported among humans. From children tussling on a playground to a sports team's home field advantage, competitors can be influenced by who is watching. View the full article

Kiwi are iconic birds that have been severely impacted by deforestation and predation from invasive mammals since the arrival of humans in New Zealand. The remaining kiwi can be split into 14 clusters that are now treated as separate conservation management units. A review published in Ibis examines the latest information on kiwi genetics to investigate the legitimacy for maintaining these differences. View the full article

Are forest fires a threat to the imperiled Spotted Owl? For years, different groups of scientists assumed so, but a new study turns this assumption on its head. Researchers from the John Muir Project, Pennsylvania State University, and Wild Nature Institute found that these previous studies consistently had a serious methodological flaw: they failed to take into account the impact of post-fire logging on Spotted Owls. View the full article

Scientists have called for the use of climate projections in conservation planning, to ensure that areas most at risk from biodiversity loss and climate impacts are protected. Protected areas are often created in areas of low population density and remote locations, rather than because of their biodiversity conservation potential. Conservation planning in tropical forests especially tends to be less rigorous and climate rarely taken into account, they said. View the full article

It is an old-standing theory in evolutionary ecology: animal species on islands have the tendency to become either giants or dwarfs in comparison to mainland relatives. Since its formulation in the 1960s, however, the 'island rule' has been severely debated by scientists. In a new publication in Nature Ecology and Evolution on April 15, researchers solved this debate by analyzing thousands of vertebrate species. They show that the island rule effects are widespread in mammals, birds and reptiles, but less evident in amphibians. View the full article

Millions of people donate billions of dollars' worth of their time to citizen-science projects each year. While these efforts have broadened our understanding of everything from birds to bees to bracken ferns, rarely has citizen-science data informed policy at the highest levels of government. But that may be changing. View the full article

There's something regal in the sprightly step and curious gaze of the long-horn sheep that roam the hills near Varisia, an abandoned village inside a U.N. buffer zone that cuts across ethnically divided Cyprus. View the full article

Half a century had passed, but UC Santa Barbara Professor Armand Kuris was sure he'd been here before. In fact, he was completely certain. After all, he had detailed notes of the location, written carefully in India ink when he was still a graduate student. View the full article

Birds have been shaped by evolution in many ways that have made them distinct from their vertebrate cousins. Over millions of years of evolution, our feathered friends have taken to the skies, accompanied by unique changes to their skeleton, musculature, respiration, and even reproductive systems. Recent genomic analyses have identified another unique aspect of the avian lineage: streamlined genomes. Although bird genomes contain roughly the same number of protein-coding genes as other vertebrates, their genomes are smaller, containing less noncoding DNA. Scientists are still exploring the potential consequences of this genome reduction on bird biology. In a new article in Genome Biology and Evolution titled "Genome size reduction and transposon activity impact tRNA gene diversity while ensuring translational stability in birds," Claudia Kutter and her colleagues reveal that, in addition to fewer protein-coding genes, bird genomes also contain surprisingly few tRNA genes, while nonetheless exhibiting the same tRNA usage patterns as other vertebrates. As tRNaAs are a pivotal part of the cellular machinery that translates messenger RNA (mRNA) into protein, this suggests that birds have evolved to use their limited tRNA repertoire more efficiently. View the full article