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A team of researchers from the University of St Andrews in the U.K. and the University of Lethbridge in Canada has found that hummingbirds are able to understand the concept of numerical order. In their paper published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the group describes experiments they conducted with wild hummingbirds and what they learned from them. View the full article -
Classical quantitative genetics has found that most phenotypes are polygenic traits. Under this polygenic model, natural selection often acts on many loci simultaneously, resulting in the combination of a few loci with major effects and many loci with small effects controlling adaptive changes in phenotypes, which presents challenges to the understanding of the genetic basis underlying polygenic traits. View the full article
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Some animals fake their body size by sounding bigger than they actually are. Maxime Garcia from the University of Zurich and Andrea Ravignani from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics studied 164 different mammals and found that animals that lower their voices to sound bigger are often skilled vocalists. Both strategies—sounding bigger and learning sounds—are likely driven by sexual selection, and may play a role in explaining the origins of human speech evolution. View the full article
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Many animals remain motionless or play dead after being attacked by a predator in the hope that it will give up and move onto some other unfortunate prey. View the full article
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From movies to museum exhibits, the dinosaur Dilophosaurus is no stranger to pop culture. Many probably remember it best from the movie "Jurassic Park," where it's depicted as a venom-spitting beast with a rattling frill around its neck and two paddle-like crests on its head. View the full article
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Making a list of all creatures, great and small
PhysOrg posted a topic in Bird Research in the Media
A paper published July 7, 2020 in the open access journal PLOS Biology outlines a roadmap for creating, for the first time, an agreed list of all the world's species, from mammals and birds to plants, fungi and microbes. View the full article -
How does evolution impact ecological patterns? It helps smooth out the rough edges, says UConn Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Mark Urban. Urban led an international team of researchers through a review of the history of ecological and evolutionary research to establish a framework to better understand evolution's impact on ecosystem patterns. The research is published as a perspective in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. View the full article
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The waters of south-eastern Australia are a climate change hotspot, warming at four times the global average. Understanding how to future-proof the prey of little penguins in these challenging conditions is essential for their long-term survival and may well benefit the health of the whole marine system. View the full article
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Binoculars in hand, birders around the world contribute every day to a massive database of bird sightings worldwide. But while community science observations of birds can be useful data, it may not be enough to fill the data gaps in developing countries where professional bird surveys are insufficient or absent. View the full article
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It was a dark time for animals. Poaching was rampant. Wild birds and mammals were being slaughtered by the thousands. An out-of-control wildlife trade was making once-common animals hard to find and pushing rare species into extinction. View the full article
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Most bird species are slow to change their tune, preferring to stick with tried-and-true songs to defend territories and attract females. Now, with the help of citizen scientists, researchers have tracked how one rare sparrow song went "viral" across Canada, traveling over 3,000 kilometers between 2000 and 2019 and wiping out a historic song ending in the process. The study, publishing July 2 in the journal Current Biology, reports that white-throated sparrows from British Columbia to central Ontario have ditched their traditional three-note-ending song in favor of a unique two-note-ending variant—although researchers still don't know what made the new song so compelling. View the full article
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A trio of researchers, two with Brown University, the other with Liverpool John Moores University, has found that a looping pattern in modern guineafowl footsteps is similar to those of certain dinosaurs. In their paper published in The Royal Society Biology Letters, Morgan Turner, Peter Falkingham and Stephen M. Gatesy describe their study of tracks made by modern guineafowl and how they compared to dinosaur tracks left in modern Connecticut. View the full article
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In Channel Islands National Park off the coast of California lives the island scrub jay, a vivid blue and gray songbird with a species population of around 1,700. The rare species makes its home exclusively on Santa Cruz Island, about 18 miles off the coast of Santa Barbara in a lush nature preserve of oak woodland and chaparral vegetation. View the full article
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New Zealand's monster penguins, which lived 62 million years ago, had doppelgangers in Japan, the U.S. and Canada, a study published today in the Journal of Zoological Systematics and Evolutionary Research has found. View the full article
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A very large international team of researchers has identified the origin of the domesticated chicken. In their paper published in the journal Cell Research, the group outlines the extensive genetic study they conducted and what they learned from it. View the full article
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The sweeping pink salt lakes across Australia's interior are all that remain of the lush green places three species of pink flamingos once thrived the outback. View the full article
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In a new study led by scientists at Point Blue Conservation Science and in collaboration with The Institute for Bird Populations, authors evaluated the successes of mountain meadow restorations by analyzing eight years of bird data collected by field biologists. The authors concluded that, when "pond and plug" and similar techniques were followed, the number of birds of many species increased over time as habitat conditions improved. View the full article
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Compiled by a team of international wildlife and veterinary experts, a new study has identified seven routes by which pandemics could occur and 161 options for reducing the risk. It concludes that widespread changes to the way we interact with animals are needed; solutions that only address one issue—such as the trade in wild animals—are not enough. View the full article
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Getting a good night's sleep is crucial for your well-being, as any new parent will tell you. Chronic sleep loss can have a range of effects on the body, from impaired memory to an increased risk of heart attack. But it's not just humans that need regular sleep. Most animals, from insects to primates, undergo a state of reduced awareness at some point in their day that we can think of as sleep. View the full article
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Barn swallows live almost everywhere on the planet, recognizable by their forked tail and agility in the air. Yet while they share these characteristics, these little birds often look slightly different in each place they live—with some so distinct they're splitting off to become new species. View the full article
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Brown-headed cowbirds show a bias in the sex ratio of their offspring depending on the time of the breeding season, researchers report in a new study. More female than male offspring hatch early in the breeding season in May, and more male hatchlings emerge in July. View the full article
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A cache of native Australian animals—including some of the country's deadliest snakes and a bird known for its swooping attacks—was seized Wednesday in raids on suspected international wildlife traffickers, police said. View the full article
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Long-tailed tits actively avoid harmful inbreeding by discriminating between the calls of close family members and non-family members, according to new research from the University of Sheffield. View the full article
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A team of researchers from the Danube Research Institute and the National Agricultural Research and Innovation Centre, both in Hungary, and Estación Biológica de Doñana, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Spain reports that is it possible for fish eggs to survive the trip through the bird digestive tract and subsequently to hatch. In their paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the group describes their experiments with birds and fish eggs and what they found. View the full article
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Female great tits (Parus major) stay clear of territories with better singing males while competing males are attracted to the territories with better singers. This unexpected conclusion was reached by researchers of Wageningen University & Research in collaboration with the Netherlands Instituut for Ecology (NIOO-KNAW). This conclusion is diametrically opposed to the current assumption that male birds use their song to impress females and repel males to stay away from their territory. View the full article
