ecology

As bees and hummingbirds move from flower to flower collecting nectar and pollinating plants, they may also be consuming small amounts of alcohol. In the first large-scale study examining alcohol in floral nectar, biologists at the University of California, Berkeley detected ethanol in at least one flower sample from 26 of the 29 plant species [...]

A team of South Korean scientists has uncovered new evidence that could help explain how Earth’s atmosphere became rich in oxygen, one of the most transformative events in the planet’s history. Researchers from the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) report the finding of stromatolites, layered structures formed by microbial communities, within the Hapcheon impact crater o…

From mid-February to early May, tiny silvery Pacific herring gather along the shallow coastlines of Vancouver Island off British Columbia, Canada. In these sheltered waters, they spawn; female fish produce sticky eggs and males flood the area with milt, which turns the water a milky turquoise or green. The colors can be so vivid that […]

Increasing human activity and climate change in Antarctica may increase the rates of non-native species introduction and establishment, resulting in potentially irreversible changes in marine and terrestrial ecological communities. The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prohibits the introduction of non-native species without a permit and mandates their removal if introd…

A fumigation experiment in the Florida Keys explains more about marketplace dynamics than most business books. Originally published at vibeagentmaking.com The Empty Island Problem In 1966, Harvard graduate student Daniel Simberloff conducted a pivotal experiment in the Florida Keys. He fumigated six tiny mangrove islands to eliminate all arthropods, then observed what happened as species naturall…

Staff at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy are overseeing the repatriation of ‘the shiest antelope’ from western zoos to their native east African country “We are bringing the boys home,” says Ngenoh Erick Kibet, a wildlife officer at the Mount Kenya Wildlife Conservancy, as a cargo plane carrying four mountain bongo touches down on a wet runway at Jomo Kenyatta international airport. The oper…

Check out this new paper that Jordan led with an incredible team of researchers across Newcastle University (including our very own Ben Hawthorne) and the University of Innsbruck, now published in Molecular Ecology Resources! Dietary RNA: integration of RNA data offers a potential paradigm shift for molecular dietary analyses It’s been just over two decades Continue reading "NEW PAPER: Dietary RN…

Check out this new preprint, now live on EcoEvoRxiv, from a collaboration co-led by Jordan and Yuval Cohen: Expanding the sentinel approach through multimodal integration: resolving underlying ecological processes with eDNA and computer vision Sentinel approaches can quantify in-field ecological interactions and processes in a semi-controlled way, also reducing bias and labour. The assignment of …

Check out this new paper published as an output of the Group on Insect Nutrition To Open Nutritional Innovative Challenges (GIN-TONIC) Cost Action! Jordan contributed to this alongside an incredible team of researchers spanning 15 institutions and 12 countries, and it’s now published in Journal of Insects as Food and Feed! Knowledge gaps in feeding Continue reading "NEW PAPER: Knowledge gaps in f…

OnLine Journal of Biological Sciences, Published online: 23 May 2026; doi:10.3844/ojbsci.2026.26.02.035 We conducted a multi-year (2020-2024) control-impact field study in a pine forest of the Moscow Region to assess whether off-road vehicle activity affects the fruiting of two ecologically important ec...

Sustainability issues related to livestock have been discussed primarily with an emphasis on their environmental effects without sufficient consideration for nutrition and other socio-economic factors. The purpose of this article review is to analyze the paper by Varijakshapanicker et al. (2019) that highlights the potential of livestock as a critical resource in enhancing the health of humans, f…

ESCANABA, Mich. — A forester, psychologist and microbiologist meet with each other in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. … No, this isn’t the start of a sappy joke. However, the story about to be told is sappy. Jesse Randall, director of the Michigan State University (MSU) Forestry Innovation Center (FIC), is working with a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional team … The post MSU Fore…

dc.title: Regulation of stomatal aperture in plants: Evidence for extracellular adenosine signaling in Arabidopsis thaliana dc.description.abstract: Extracellular adenosine functions as a hormone-like signal through G-protein-coupled purinergic receptors in animal cells. Although plant cells do use extracellular ATP signaling via purinergic receptors, there is currently no evidence for extracellu…

Firefighters are racing to douse flames on Santa Rosa Island as experts express concern for survival of its unique habitat On the south-eastern corner of Santa Rosa Island lies a grove of a few thousand Torrey pine trees, some of them more than 250 years old . The only other place on earth where these gnarled pines exist is in San Diego county, but biologists classify the two groves as different …

Cambridgeshire: It was nearly ready to fly but it was partly out of its chrysalis and partly still in it On Sunday morning, I was pottering in the garden wondering what to do. I saw a flapping coming from my wildflower patch, so I went to my clump of clover. I pushed it away, only to reveal a large white butterfly fresh out of its chrysalis. It had been drying its damp wings in the sun. Then I re…