News by Subject Biology

From geckos to goblin spiders, flowering plants, and Mediterranean ants -- spanning five continents and three oceans -- these 71 new species described by Academy scientists grow Earth's tree of life.

A study by researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) shows that the microbial communities inside whales may play an important role in the digestion of one of the ocean's most abundant carbon-rich lipids, known as a wax ester.

Placing lights on fishing nets reduces the chances of sea turtles and dolphins being caught by accident, new research shows.

Ommochromes, the pigments that color the skin of squids and other invertebrates, could be used in the food and health sectors for their antioxidant and antimicrobial properties. This is confirmed by the analyses carried out by researchers from the University of Sonora in Mexico and the Miguel Hernández University in Spain.

More than 100 years ago, zoologist Herbert Spencer Jennings described surprisingly varied avoidance behaviors in the single-celled freshwater protist Stentor roeseli. When later experiments in a related organism failed to reproduce what he'd seen, his claims were discredited. Now, a report publishing in the journal Current Biology on Dec. 5 confirms what Jennings witnessed all those years ago: observations captured by the researchers on video show that S. roeseli varies its response when squirted with a stream of polystyrene beads.

LSU researcher Kristine DeLong uses 120,000-year-old fossils to predict how Gulf of Mexico coral reefs will respond to climate change toward the end of this century.

A computational analysis has surfaced new insights into the wind and water conditions that cause Kemp's ridley sea turtles to become stranded on beaches in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Xiaojian Liu of Wuhan University, China, and colleagues present these findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on December 4, 2019.

Study sheds new light on the impact of natural methane production on global climate change assessments.