Browsing Tag 'Evolution'
The archerfish’s long distance spitting can fire a bug off of a branch and send it down to the water’s surface, and the nearly-blind pistol shrimp uses its gigantic claw to stun its prey with a bubble nearly as hot as the Sun. However, if the archerfish didn’t have keen eyes enabling it to detect an insect against a vegetative background, and if the pistol shrimp lacked its protective eye covers, called orbital hoods, these animals might never have developed the ballistic mechanisms that characterize them.
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Since Darwin, scientists have been theorizing as to why there is variation in brain size between species and individuals. Does a larger brain, in say humans, indicate advanced cognitive abilities and complex language processing? Or is a smaller brain, such as the Olive-backed thrush’s, adapted to weigh less to accommodate lengthy flights?
In psychology, the field of phrenology has generally been dissolved, and with it, the idea that variations in brain size could indicate differences in intelligence, creativity or personality between humans. In the field of biology, however, scientists are discovering that brain variation across species might actually be linked to ecological competence. In this case, ecological competence describes the efficiency of a species to engage in ecological processes—such as flexible foraging abilities or advanced spatial memory for migration.
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Convergent evolution of large functional traits is not uncommon in nature; consider that wings have evolved in several lineages of animals to broaden niches that animals can fill. But more specific convergence, especially in sexual and territorial signals, is rare at best and stirs controversy in the scientific world. On the surface, it would seem [...]
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A stroma, or spore-releasing body, of a killer fungus grows out of the head of a victim ant. Image courtesy David Hughes and with thanks to Science News. As much as Hollywood might want you to think they exist, zombies are fictitious. But a study out today claims that actually, they kind of do exist [...]
Read more...The field of disease ecology is a fast-evolving one as ecologists realize more and more that the insides of animals and plants are really like small-scale ecosystems, encompassing the same rules as large-scale ecosystems, like species interactions, environmental variability and evolutionary change. Katia Koelle of Duke University gave a talk yesterday about evolution in the [...]
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