White sturgeon populations in the Columbia River may be declining due to the presence of elevated amounts of foreign chemicals including DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls in their bodies, according to new studies by researchers at Oregon State University.
The research by Carl Schreck and Grant Feist, biologists in OSU’s College of Agricultural Sciences, has been published in the journals Environmental Health Perspectives and Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.
Animals bred in captivity for reintroduction to the wild are able to retain their defences against predators for several generations, ecologists have found. According to new research published in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology, tadpoles of the Mallorcan midwife toad (Alytes muletensis) retain their ability to change their body shape – a defence they have evolved in the face of predators – even after being bred in captivity for three to eight generations. The
An international team of scientists are working at a rapid pace to study environmental conditions behind the fast-acting and widespread coral bleaching currently plaguing Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. NASA’s satellite data supply scientists with near-real-time sea surface temperature and ocean color data to give them faster than ever insight into the impact coral bleaching can have on global ecology.
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is a massive marine habitat system made up of 2,90
Fecal matter of red colobus monkeys collected in western Uganda has yielded a wealth of knowledge about human land-use change and wildlife health and conservation. The main lesson, researchers say, is that the intensity of tree removal translates directly to parasite populations and the risk of infection of their hosts.
In an effort to glean predictive power out of years of research on the effects of forest fragmentation on various species and ecological processes, researchers looked
Gas leaks can be potentially life threatening in the home, but the presence of gas stresses out plants too. Professor Mike Steven and colleagues from the University of Nottingham have found that changes in the physical properties of plants can act as an early warning of leaks in natural gas pipelines. “Our study was about testing the ability of satellite remote systems to monitor gas leaks via the spectrum of reflected light from plants, which changes when the plants are stressed”, says Steven.
Lethal measures to control wolf attacks on cattle and sheep are ineffective in the long-term, new study finds
Costly and time-consuming efforts to eliminate wolves that prey on sheep, cattle and other domestic animals are ineffective on a long-term, regional scale, according to an examination of wolf control methods in Alberta and several U.S. states by University of Calgary researchers.
Results of the study were presented today at an annual meeting of wolf scientists,
As long-lived predators at the top of the marine food chain, albatrosses accumulate toxic contaminants such as PCBs, DDT, and mercury in their bodies. A new study has found dramatic differences in contaminant levels between two closely related albatross species that forage in different areas of the North Pacific. Researchers also found that levels of PCBs and DDT have increased in both species over the past ten years.
The differences in contaminant levels between black-footed and
FOR decades it has been known as the red river, the stream running through a former mining village overlooking the North Sea.
But now scientists at the University of Teesside in Middlesbrough, England, believe they have the answer to the rust-coloured staining of the river caused by ochre – the earthy pigment containing ferric oxide – that leeches out of the old underground workings 40 years after the last mines closed.
The team from Teesside University’s Clean Envir
The Canadian prairies are facing an unprecedented water crisis due to a combination of climate warming, increase in human activity and historic drought, says new research by the University of Alberta’s Dr. David Schindler, one of the world’s leading environmental scientists.
“The western prairies are worse than other areas of Canada,” said Schindler, co-author of a paper published in the journal “Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences,” early online edition. “One of the r
85 percent of respondents said global warming ’probably been happening’ but only 38 percent ’extremely or very sure about it’
Most Americans are pessimistic about the state of the environment and want action taken to improve its health, according to a new national survey conducted by Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment.
Fifty-five percent of Americans surveyed said they expect the world’s natural environment to be in wors
“The further birds migrate north for the summer, the faster they put on weight”, says Dr Williams (Simon Fraser University, Canada) who has been tracking migrating birds for several years. “This research may have implications for the designation of protected areas which will ensure birds can complete their spring and autumn migrations.” Dr Williams will present his research on Tuesday 4th April at the Society for Experimental Biology’s Annual Main Meeting in Canterbury [session A4].
“O
Large quantities of Saharan dust are helping to fertilize the massive plankton blooms that occur in the tropical eastern Atlantic, a research project has confirmed.
A team including researchers from the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia has been studying the desert dust, which is rich in nitrogen, iron and phosphorus, and its effect on the ocean’s nutrients, plankton production and the food chain.
The £600,000 project, is part of the Sur
Scientists at CEFAS (UK) have found that the migration pattern of wild cod is much less restricted by environmental temperature than laboratory studies suggest. Previously, research in the lab indicated that the preferred temperature range of cod was between 11-15ºC. However scientists following movements of wild cod equipped with electronic tags that record depth and temperature have found that whilst some fish prefer deeper cooler waters, others tagged at the same time prefer to swim in shallowe
The Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) today applauded a decision today by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to list the Tibetan antelope, also known as “chiru,” as an endangered species. Through a series of expeditions to China’s windswept Chang Tang Reserve over the past two decades, WCS had played a key role in sounding the alarm about the dramatic decline of this elegant animal due to poaching.
The antelope’s wool, considered the finest in the world, is used for “sh
Ecologists have long asked, Why is the world green? In other words, why aren’t herbivores, such as insects and grazing animals, more successful at eating the world’s green leaves, also known as plant biomass? In the May 2006 issue of American Naturalist, Steven D. Allison (University of California, Irvine) asks the same questions a different way: Why is the ground brown? Why don’t the organisms that break down the carbon in the soil consume it all?
Some of the same ecologic
Economic assessment of ecological services reveals reliance on nature’s bounty
Although the economic importance of insects in providing honey and silk is well known, many other valuable services provided by insects are commonly overlooked. In the April 2006 issue of BioScience, the monthly journal of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, John E. Losey of Cornell University and Mace Vaughan of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation estimate the value (as i
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