A special August issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association, presents a host of studies that investigate the way that animals adapt their calls, chirps, barks and whistles to their social situation.
The special issue, Acoustic Interaction in Animal Groups: Signaling in Noisy and Social Contexts, reports on findings from [...]
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Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.
In a new article published online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers argue that substantial die-offs of amphibians [...]
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Lack of oxygen can do in most creatures, but a new study has found epaulette sharks have evolved a clever solution for avoiding suffocation — they shut down their body’s electrical activity and even go temporarily blind until they can properly “breathe” oxygen again through their gills.
The discovery puts the shark on the short list [...]
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Just as humans tune into individual radio stations, an unusual Chinese frog can shift its hearing from one frequency to another in order to selectively choose what it hears, according to a paper published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The frog, Odorrana tormota, is the only known animal in the world [...]
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When you were young, did you ever lie on your belly in a field, watching a bug crawling up a blade of grass? Did you stand perfectly still in a creek, hoping to catch a frog? Did a garter snake ever slither across your bare foot in the backyard, only to be caught in your [...]
A farm irrigation canal would seem a healthier place for toads than a ditch by a supermarket parking lot.
But University of Florida scientists have found the opposite is true. In a study with wide implications for a longstanding debate over whether agricultural chemicals pose a threat to amphibians, UF zoologists have found that toads in [...]
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New exquisitely preserved fossils from Latvia cast light on a key event in our own evolutionary history, when our ancestors left the water and ventured onto land. Swedish researchers Per Ahlberg and Henning Blom from Uppsala University have reconstructed parts of the animal and explain the transformation in the new issue of Nature.
It has long [...]
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Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC) genes produce proteins that are crucial in fighting pathogen assault. Researchers from the Jagiellonian University in Krakow and from the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) characterized genetic variation and detected more than one MHC class II locus in a tailed amphibian. Unlike mammals, not much has been known until now [...]
Continue reading about New Findings On Immune System In Amphibians May Assist Conservation Efforts
Scientists were surprised with findings of a recent study that reveals many animal species believed to persist in small contained areas actually need broad, landscape level conservation to survive.
With more species at risk of extinction today than any other time in human history, the findings of the study published in the debut issue of Conservation [...]
It is widely known that the right and left hemispheres of the brain perform different tasks. Lesions to the left hemisphere typically bring impairments in language production and comprehension, while lesions to the right hemisphere give rise to deficits in the visual-spatial perception, such as the inability to recognize familiar faces.
In the last few years, [...]
