News by Subject Biology

Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have mapped the regions of the brain in mormyrid fish in extremely high detail. The new measurements can help illuminate longstanding questions in neuroanatomy. As brains get bigger, do all regions of the brain scale up in a predictable way? Or does natural selection act independently on separate regions of the brain -- such that certain parts of the brain become enlarged in animals that have extra reasons to use them?

The escape response to evade perceived threats is a fundamental behavior seen throughout the animal kingdom, and laboratory studies have identified specialized neural circuits that control this behavior. To understand how these neural circuits operate in complex natural settings, researchers recorded and analyzed escape responses in wild coral reef fish. Their results show how a sequence of well-defined decision rules generates evasion behavior in a wide range of coral reef fish species.

Scars left by orca attacks indicate that most victims are young whales on the first trip from breeding to feeding grounds. Increasing numbers of scars may mean that there are more orcas in the Southern Pacific, researchers say.

Even a Category 4 hurricane doesn't kill the mood for coastal fish -- and that's good news for all species, as well as for a multibillion-dollar recreational fishing industry. As extreme weather patterns threaten to bring more and larger storms to the Gulf Coast, new findings from the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute show some important fish species are able to continue spawning even in a severe storm.

In a new study published in Communications Biology, NYU Abu Dhabi Assistant Professor of Biology Shady Amin, along with Philippe Schmitt-Kopplin from the Helmholtz Center Munich, report that corals, though they are stationary organisms, can alter their surroundings by producing unique molecules that can help recruit healthy microbiomes and fight parasitic microbes.

Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego and the University of British Columbia found that even if fishers used the most efficient and sustainable known practices, they wouldn't generate enough revenue to maintain a living above poverty level.

Process waters from the seafood industry contain valuable nutrients, that could be used in food or aquaculture feed. But currently, these process waters are treated as waste. Now, a research project from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, shows the potential of recycling these nutrients back into the food chain.