News by Subject Biology

Feet from the raw bars and sherbet-colored condominiums of Florida's Cedar Key, researchers discovered a new species of egg-sucking sea slug, a rare outlier in a group famous for being ultra-vegetarians.

A remote sensing algorithm offers better predictions of Red Sea coral bleaching and can be fine tuned for use in other tropical marine ecosystems.

A wearable noninvasive device based on near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) can be used to investigate blood volume and oxygenation patterns in freely diving marine mammals, according to a study publishing June 18 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by J. Chris McKnight of the University of St. Andrews, and colleagues. The results provide new insights into how voluntarily diving seals distribute blood and manage the oxygen supply to their brains and blubber.

The common perception that pesticides reduce or eliminate target insect species may not always hold. Jennifer Weathered and Edd Hammill report that the impacts of agricultural pesticides on assemblages of aquatic insects varied resulting in distinct ecological winners and losers within aquatic communities.

Scientists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Vanderbilt University and Clark University have shed new light on the genomic foundation of the polar bear's ecological adaption by pinpointing rapid changes in the bear's gene copy numbers in response to a diet shifting from vegetation to meat.

Most fishing communities from North Carolina to Maine are projected to face declining fishing options unless they adapt to climate change by catching different species or fishing in different areas, according to a study in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Some dinoflagellate plankton species are bioluminescent, with a remarkable ability to produce light to make themselves and the water they swim in glow. Now, researchers reporting in Current Biology on June 17 have found that for one dinoflagellate species (Lingulodinium polyedra), this bioluminescence is also a defense mechanism that helps them ward off the copepod grazers that would like to eat them.