and elsewhere in Massachusetts including flowering dates butterfly flight times and migratory bird arrivals. Founded in 1839 Boston University is recognized an internationally institution of higher education and research.
diet genetics and the microbiology of the cow's rumen. We think that animal genetics may well influence their gut microbiology.
Cows have a rumen as well a stomach he adds. As a result their digestive system is far more complex and hard to understand than ours he notes.
De Haas describes the project approach of gathering rumen samples and looking at the interaction with methane production is a novel one.
Over time it could improve practice with beef as well as milk herds and with other ruminants such as sheep deer and goats.
#War elephant myths debunked by DNATHROUGH DNA analysis Illinois researchers have disproved years of rumors and hearsay surrounding the ancient Battle of Raphia the only known battle between Asian and African elephants.
What everyone thinks about war elephants is said wrong Alfred Roca a Professor of Animal Sciences
and member of the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who led the research published in the Journal of Heredity.
According to historical records Antiochus's ancestor traded vast areas of land for 500 Asian elephants whereas Ptolemy established trading posts for war elephants in what is now Eritrea a country with the northernmost population of elephants
In the Battle of Raphia Ptolemy had 73 African war elephants and Antiochus had 102 Asian war elephants according to Polybius a Greek historian who described the battle at least 70 years later.
A few of Ptolemy's elephants ventured too close with those of the enemy and now the men in the towers on the back of these beasts made a gallant fight of it striking with their pikes at close quarters
and wounding each other while the elephants themselves fought still better putting forth their whole strength
and meeting forehead to forehead said Polybius in The Histories. Ptolemy's elephants however declined the combat as is the habit of African elephants;
for unable to stand the smell and the trumpeting of the Asian elephants and terrified
I suppose also by their great size and strength they at once turn tail and take to flight before they get near them.
and scientists and that is why Asian elephants were given the name Elephas maximus said Neal Benjamin an Illinois veterinary student who studies elephant taxonomy and ancient literature with Roca.
and it became clearer that African elephants were mostly larger than Asian elephants At this point speculation began about why the African elephants in the Polybius account might have been smaller.
In 1948 Sir William Gowers reasoned that Ptolemy must have fought with forest elephants that fled from larger Asian elephants as Polybius described.
Did Ptolemy employ African savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) or African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) in the Battle or Raphia?
Using three different markers we established that the Eritrean elephants are actually savanna elephants said Adam Brandt a doctoral candidate in Roca's laboratory and first author of the paper.
Their DNA was very similar to neighboring populations of East African savanna elephants but with very low genetic diversity
The markers also revealed that these Eritrean elephants have no genetic ties to forest or Asian elephants as other authorities have suggested.
For MITOCHONDRIAL DNA (mtdna) the genetic information is passed from mother to offspring and is transmitted not by males.
Female elephants stay with their natal herd while the males disperse to mate with different populations.
whether there had been forest or Asian elephants in the Eritrean population at one time. In some sense mtdna is the ideal marker
The most convincing evidence is the lack of mtdna from forest elephants in Eritrea. Roca and Brandt hope their findings will aid conservation efforts.
and their closest relatives the East African savanna elephants to provide an influx of genetic diversity.
and one of the things at the top of their list is the elephants. The paper The Elephants of Gash-Barka Eritrea:
Nuclear and Mitochondrial Genetic Patterns was published in the Journal of Heredity and is available online.
The late Jeheskel Shoshani an evolutionary biologist and world-renowned elephant specialist was instrumental in this research.
A robust animal it is now found on every continent with an estimated worldwide population of around 40 million.
With artificial insemination male breeding animals can produce more than one hundred thousand offspring. Infertility caused by a single gene This practice is fraught with risk however:
If the genetic make-up of any animal contains an unidentified defect this characteristic will be passed on to future generations.
Otherwise the animals are perfectly healthy and normal points out Dr. Hubert Pausch lead author of the study.
It is only in this case that the animals should be excluded from breeding. Routine genetic testing for all breeding bulls has been underway since August 2012.
Findings of interest for human medicineas part of their study the researchers compared the genome of 40 subfertile animals with 8000 breeding bulls with normal fertility levels.
They discovered that the genetic defect can be traced back to one Fleckvieh animal born in 1966.
and also the diseases that animals pass on. With this knowledge we can not only improve yield
and ensuring that they are passed not on to future animals. One example is a genetic defect
#EU policy is driving up demand for pollination faster than honeybee numbersresearch conducted by the University of Reading's Centre for Agri-Environmental Research
and the Insect Pollinators Initiative Crops project indicates that demand for pollination services has risen five times as fast as the number of colonies across Europe.
The study led by Professor Simon Potts compared the number of available honeybee colonies in 41 European countries with their demands for pollination services in the years 2005 and 2010.
although the total number of honeybee colonies increased in some European countries the demands for the pollination services supplied by these pollinators has increased much faster due to the increasing demand for biofuel feedstocks.
and Italy honeybee stocks were found to be insufficient to supply these pollination services alone.
Dr Tom Breeze who conducted the research said This study has shown that EU biofuel policy has had an unforeseen consequence in making us more reliant upon wild pollinators like bumblebees and hoverflies to meet demands forthis
Adding The results don't show that wild pollinators actually do all the work but they do show we have less security
which the study suggests has now less than 25%of the honeybee colonies it needs. The only country with less security is the Republic of Moldova
if taken as a continuous region where colonies could move freely Europe as a whole only has two thirds of the honeybee colonies it needs with a deficit of over 13.6 million colonies.
Many of the most important crops in Europe such as rapeseed sunflower soybeans apples and strawberries benefit from pollination by insects.
and other organisations to better understand the role of different pollinators in European agriculture. Story Source The above story is provided based on materials by Pensoft Publishers.
Experiments testing the potential of the four symbiotic species to cause infection in the small nematode worm known as Caenorhabditis elegans
#Two million years ago, human relative Nutcracker Man lived on tiger nutsan Oxford university study has concluded that our ancient ancestors who lived in East Africa between 2. 4 million-1
. 4 million years ago mainly ate tiger nuts (grass bulbs) supplemented with the odd grasshopper and worm.
An Oxford university study has concluded that our ancient ancestors who lived in East Africa between 2. 4 million-1. 4 million years ago survived mainly on a diet of tiger nuts.
Tiger nuts are edible grass bulbs still eaten in parts of the world today. The study published in the journal PLOS ONE also suggests that these early hominins may have sought additional nourishment from fruits and invertebrates like worms and grasshoppers.
Study author Dr Gabriele Macho examined the diet of Paranthropus boisei nicknamed Nutcracker Man because of his big flat molar teeth and powerful jaws through studying modern-day baboons
in Kenya. Her findings help to explain a puzzle that has vexed archaeologists for 50 years.
Dr Macho's study finds that baboons today eat large quantities of C4 tiger nuts
Her finding is grounded in existing data that details the diet of year-old baboons in Amboseli National park in Kenya--a similar environment to that once inhabited by Paranthropus boisei.
Dr Macho's study is based on the assumption that baboons intuitively select food according to their needs.
Dr Macho modified the findings of the previous study on baboons by Stuart Altmann (1998) on how long it took the year-old baboons to dig up tiger nuts
She calculated the likely time taken by hominins suggesting that it would be at least twice that of the yearling baboons once their superior manual dexterity was taken into account.
Tiger nuts which are rich in starches are highly abrasive in an unheated state. Dr Macho suggests that hominins'teeth suffered abrasion and wear and tear due to these starches.
The study finds that baboons'teeth have similar marks giving clues about their pattern of consumption.
In order to digest the tiger nuts and allow the enzymes in the saliva to break down the starches the hominins would need to chew the tiger nuts for a long time.
All this chewing put considerable strain on the jaws and teeth which explains why Nutcracker Man had such a distinctive cranial anatomy.
The Oxford study calculates a hominin could extract sufficient nutrients from a tiger nut-based diet i e. around 10000 kilojoules or 2000 calories a day--or 80%of their required daily calorie intake in two and half to three hours.
This fits comfortably within the foraging time of five to six hours per day typical for a large-bodied primate.
Dr Macho from the School of Archaeology at Oxford university said:''I believe that the theory--that Nutcracker Man lived on large amounts of tiger nuts-helps settle the debate about what our early human ancestor ate.
On the basis of recent isotope results these hominins appear to have survived on a diet of C4 foods
'Tiger nuts still sold in health food shops as well as being used widely for grinding down and baking in many countries would be relatively easy to find.
#Drought and drowning equal vulture supermarketafrican vultures are famous for quickly finding carcasses; so much so that they are considered clairvoyants in parts of Africa.
But just how do vultures know where to find food across vast regions in the first place? In a paper appearing in the January 8th edition of the journal PLOS ONE Dr. Corinne Kendall of Columbia University
and African Vulture Technical Advisor with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and colleagues have discovered that vultures rather than aggregating where animals are most abundant as previously thought
and conditions where animals are most likely to die. For decades scientists have assumed that vultures would follow the largest food source available.
In the case of the Mara-Serengeti ecosystem this would be the migratory wildebeest herds
which in recent years have numbered in the millions. Instead this study found that two of the three species of vultures studied preferentially selected areas of low rainfall
and thus presumably high prey mortality. Data were collected from GSM-GPS telemetry devices attached to three species of vultures in Mara-Serengeti ecosystem of East Africa.
The devices send text messages back to the researcher detailing individual bird's location and altitude.
The data revealed that vultures focused on the immense wildebeest herds only during the dry season
when hundreds of wildebeest die each day from starvation or drowning during their dangerous river crossings.
Our study shows that vultures seek out areas not where wildlife are most abundant but where they are most likely to die said lead author Corinne Kendall.
This shows that for vultures prey mortality is more important than prey abundance. The researchers found that for the rest of the year vultures travel enormous distances in search of food.
Kendall said: What has surprised really us is what the vultures do the rest of the year.
From November to June the vultures travel all over Kenya and Northern Tanzania with some individuals using an area of more than 200000 square kilometers (77000 square miles)--that's a region larger than New jersey
and New york state combined or roughly the size of the entire United kingdom. As one of the only obligate scavengers in the animal kingdom vultures are adapted specially to feed on dead animals or carcasses.
Keith Bildstein Director of Conservation Science at Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and a study co-author said:
We knew that vultures use efficient soaring flight keen eyesight and even used information from each other to find food
but we had a poor sense of how they decide where to search on a landscape scale.
In recent years these large movements have spelled disaster for the birds. White-backed vultures and Ruppell's vultures two of the species studied have been listed up to Endangered status by the IUCN due to dramatic declines seen throughout the African continent.
Munir Virani Director of Africa programs for the Peregrine Fund and co-author of the study said:
Because the vultures spend so much time outside of protected areas they are extremely susceptible to poisoning
which often occurs when ranchers put pesticides on the carcasses of cows and other animals killed by lions or hyenas.
You can imagine how difficult it is to protect a species that uses not just multiple parks
But protecting these critical scavengers which help to keep the African savannas clean and reduce the risk of rabies
and other diseases is now the focus of a new effort by the Wildlife Conservation Society the Peregrine Fund and Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
Dr. Steve Zack Coordinator of Bird Conservation at WCS who is working with Dr. Kendall
and others in shaping a conservation effort to revive vulture populations while eliminating the poisoning said:
This information is critical to understanding the scale of effort needed to protect vulture species in East Africa.
This work was done in collaboration with Dr. Virani of The Peregrine Fund Dr. Hopcraft of Frankfurt Zoological Society Dr. Bildstein of Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and Dr. Rubenstein of Princeton university.
#Oceanographer examines pollutants in Antarctic seal milkan oceanographer from the University of Rhode island is analyzing the milk from Antarctic fur seals to determine the type
and quantity of pollutants the seals are accumulating and passing on to their pups. Rainer Lohmann a professor at the URI Graduate school of Oceanography is collaborating with a researcher at the Southwest Fisheries science Center in California to learn about the health and ecology of fur seals that winter in different locations in the South Pacific.
What we're trying to learn is where the pollutants come from and how those pollutants vary by where the seals feed said Lohmann who has conducted studies of marine pollutants around the world.
Fur seals that have given birth have lower pollutant levels than those that have not because they pass their pollutants on to their pups in their milk.
All of the seals the researchers are studying breed on the South Shetland islands of Antarctica but some spend the winter off the coast of Argentina while others winter off Chile.
The two groups are thought to be exposed to different pollutants in the food they eat at their wintering grounds.
According to Lohmann seal milk is about 50 percent fat enabling young seals to grow rapidly.
And due to the pups'smaller size the researchers speculate that the young seals are effected more seriously by the pollutants than are older and larger seals.
The seals can't avoid the pollutants so the best we can hope for is that the concentration of pollutants will decrease in their system over time
But now Thomas Peacock an associate professor of mechanical engineering at MIT has teamed with researchers from the Ecole Centrale de Lyon the Ecole Normale Superieure de Lyon
These are the most powerful internal waves discovered thus far in the ocean Peacock says. These are skyscraper-scale waves.
They are the lumbering giants of the ocean Peacock says. The team's large-scale laboratory experiments on the generation of such waves used a detailed topographic model of the Luzon Strait's seafloor mounted in a 50-foot-diameter rotating tank in Grenoble France
It's an important missing piece of the puzzle in climate modeling Peacock says. Right now global climate models are not able to capture these processes he says
These waves are potentially the key mechanism for transferring heat from the upper ocean to the depths Peacock says so the focus of the research was to determine exactly how the largest of these waves as revealed through satellite imagery of the Luzon Strait region are generated.
The existence of internal waves in oceans has been known for well over a century Peacock says but they have remained poorly understood because of the difficulty of observations Among the new techniques that have helped to propel the field forward is the use of satellite data:
From 15 years of data you can filter out the noise Peacock explains: Many locations such as the Luzon Strait generate these waves in a steady predictable way as tides flow over submerged ridges and through narrow channels.
Internal waves can bring nutrients up from ocean depths Peacock says. Matthew Alford an associate professor of oceanography at the University of Washington who was involved in the related field studies for this project says The strong forcing
The research carried out by Peacock and a team of eight other researchers was funded by the ONR the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique and the Agence Nationale de la Recherche in France and the MIT-France Program.
#Study of African forest elephants helps guide research efforts in USCONSERVATION of a protected or endangered species requires frequent monitoring
and the dynamic techniques biologists utilize to ensure the survival of threatened animals. Often scientists study biodiversity at all levels--from genes to entire ecosystems.
Currently researchers at the University of Missouri are employing genotyping to study movement patterns of African forest elephants in protected and unprotected regions of Gabon to better understand how human occupation of these areas might affect elephants on the African continent.
Many times analyzing dangerous animals with a hands-on approach is risky so genetic samples and traces collected through hair samples fecal samples
In Africa protected areas are designed often around sites that support endangered species such as large mammals.
We were tasked with studying elephants outside a protected region in an area that includes humans oil-drilling platforms and disturbances by machinery.
We also studied how the elephants moved between the protected regions and the unprotected regions during wet and dry seasons.
Between 2002 and 2011 the population of Central African forest elephants declined by 62 percent
The largest remaining concentration of this species approximately 53000 individuals is in Gabon where officials have established 13 national parks designated as habitats for elephants.
and how the elephants migrated between them. What the scientists found was interconnected that the region not designated as a national park provides year-round habitat for elephants
and is important to the conservation of the species. We discovered that elephants tend to use the unprotected area as much as they do protected the parks said Eggert.
A resident population exists in the unprotected area even though drilling occurs there and humans are present.
Some of the elephants seem to consider this their home range and instead of moving back and forth between the national parks they inhabit the unprotected area during the rainy and dry seasons.
Eggert's fellow researchers collected samples from elephant droppings in the unprotected area and in the national parks and sent more than 1000 samples back to Eggert
She and her colleagues detected more than 500 elephants in the unprotected area during both the wet
Elephants are considered to be a'keystone'species or a species that is especially important to the health of ecosystems in Africa Eggert said.
and here in the U s. The fact that elephants are surviving in a place where drilling for oil is happening is exciting
and her team conducted with elephants in Africa involves methods used to study species worldwide.
Her lab recently worked with the Missouri Department of Conservation to analyze black bears in Missouri
and Arkansas and also has collaborated on the analysis of otters and hellbenders in Missouri rivers. Her study Using genetic profiles of African forest elephants to infer population structure movements
and habitat use in a conservation and development landscape in Gabon was published in Conservation Biology in collaboration with Jesus Maldonado Alfonso Alonso Rob Fleischer and Francisco Dallmeier with the Smithsonian Institution and colleagues at the University of Groningen the University of Oxford and the Centre
#Might more ravens--aided by humans--mean nevermore for sage-grouse? A new study by the Wildlife Conservation Society Idaho State university and the U s. Geological Survey suggests that habitat fragmentation
and the addition of makeshift perches such as transmission polls in sagebrush ecosystems are creating preferred habitat for common ravens that threaten sensitive native bird species including greater sage grouse.
The study appears in the January issue of the journal The Condor: Ornithological Applications. Authors include Kristy Howe of the Wildlife Conservation Society and Idaho State university Peter Coates of the U s. Geological Survey and David Delehanty of Idaho State university.
The authors looked at 82 raven nests on the U s. Department of energy's Idaho National Laboratory land in southeastern Idaho a sagebrush steppe ecosystem where ravens increased in numbers eleven-fold between 1985 and 2009.
Results showed that 58 percent of raven nests were located on transmission poles 19 percent were in trees
A 31 percent decrease in the likelihood of nesting by ravens was observed for every one kilometer increase in distance away from a transmission line
or near them may afford the raven myriad advantages including a wider range of vision greater attack speed
Nesting on the poles may also gain them greater security from predators range fires and heat stress.
and food we are subsidizing ravens and providing them with the opportunities and advantages they need to excel in areas that they didn't before said lead author Kristy Howe.
This is bad news for the animals in that ecosystem upon which ravens prey. Common raven populations have increased more than 300 percent over the last 40 years in the western United states
. Along with the eggs and nestlings of greater sage grouse ravens also prey on the federally endangered Desert tortoise the endangered San Clemente Loggerhead shrike and the California Least Tern.
In addition to proximity to transmission lines ravens in the study area selected nest sites that were in close proximity to edges formed between sagebrush
and land cover types associated with direct human disturbance such as introduction of nonnative species or fire.
The degree of this fragmentation averaged 2. 4 times greater at nest locations in the study area than at random unaltered sites.
The scientists believe that in contrast to continuous sagebrush stands edges enable the ravens to more readily detect prey
and depredate nests of other bird species. The authors summarized that among all variables the distance to transmission lines distance to edge
and amount of edge had the greatest relative importance to ravens in selecting nesting locations.
However the findings in the study indicated that ravens also preferred nesting areas with nonnative vegetation
The results of these findings pointed to further increases in raven abundance in formerly natural sagebrush steppe following alterations made by people specifically those associated with energy development and an expanding electric grid.
The authors state Such an increase likely poses an increased threat to sagebrush steppe species subject to raven depredation including sage-grouse for
which eggs and young are consumed by ravens. WCS Northern Rockies Program Coordinator Jeff Burrell said Sagebrush steppe is one of the most important and most threatened habitats in the western U s. Healthy sagebrush steppe provides crucial cover
and food resources for a wealth of species including sage-grouse pronghorn and mule deer. Poor livestock grazing management invasive species such as cheatgrass transmission lines energy development and subdivisions are all contributing to the loss of this vital resource.
as a result of grid development and that protecting unaltered landscapes from fragmentation by transmission lines roads crested wheatgrass plantings and the invasion of other nonnative vegetation is integral to stemming range expansion by ravens.
#Novel attract-and-kill approach could help tackle Argentine antsafter being introduced inadvertently in the United states from South america Argentine ants have invaded successfully urban agricultural and natural settings nationwide.
In urban California The argentine ant is among the primary pest ants. For example this particular species of ants makes up 85 percent of ants sampled by commercial pest control companies in just the Greater San diego Area.
Entomologists at the University of California Riverside have developed now a pheromone-assisted technique as an economically viable approach to maximize the efficacy of conventional sprays targeting the invasive Argentine ant.
They supplemented insecticide sprays with (Z)- 9-hexadecenal a pheromone compound attractive to ants and were able to divert Argentine ants from their trails and nest entrances.
Lured by the pheromone the ants were exposed eventually to the insecticide residue and killed. Study results appeared Dec 23 2013 in the online fast track edition of the Journal of Economic Entomology.
Our experiments with fipronil and bifenthrin sprays indicate that the overall kill of these insecticides on Argentine ant colonies is improved substantially--by 57 to 142 percent--by incorporating (Z)- 9-hexadecenal in the sprays said Dong-Hwan Choe an assistant professor of entomology
and the research project leader whose lab focuses on urban entomology insect behavior and chemical ecology.
According to Choe's research team the current attract -and-kill approach once it is implemented successfully in practical pest management programs could potentially provide maximum control efficacy with reduced amount of insecticides applied in the environment.
Given the amount of insecticides applied today to urban settings for Argentine ant control and the impact of these insecticides on urban waterways it is critical to develop alternative integrated pest management strategies
in order to decrease the overall amounts of insecticides applied and found in urban waterways while still providing effective control of the target ant species Choe said.
He explained that other studies have explored the possibility of using the synthetic pheromone (Z)- 9-hexadecenal for Argentine management program.
These studies however only explored the use of the pheromone to disrupt the foraging of Argentine ants.
and low-dose pheromone to attract ants Choe said. Our ultimate goal is to minimize the impact of pest damages on urban life with at the same time no
--or minimal--negative impact on the environment non-target organisms and human health. According to Choe from a practical standpoint future development of the proper formulation of (Z)- 9-hexadecenal would help improve its efficacy and usability.
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