This isn’t a cop convention. These are marine mammal biologists, but they do care about speed limits. At the 18th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, Science News reporter Susan Milius blogs about manatee researcher Edmund Gerstein's work on boat speeds and gory collisions with manatees. Gerstein is the guy at this meeting who has been arguing what sounds just backward at first. In circumstances such as murky water, he says, slow boats are more likely to hit manatees than are fast boats: Slow boats don’t make as much noise within the manatee hearing range, he says. So when manatees have to rely on sound to detect boats, the animals don’t pick up the warning until too late. There's also news on how well -- or not well -- speed limits set for boats that frequent the same waters as right whales are being followed.

New estimates suggest the mammals’ feeding habits help take in carbon.

Donkeys sleep about three out of each 24 hours. Certain reef fish spend the night moving their fins as if swimming in their sleep. Some biologists argue that all animals sleep in some form or another. But identifying sleep can get complicated. Insects have brain architecture so different from humans’, for example, that electrophysiological recordings during “sleep” won’t match human patterns. The real problem may be that researchers haven’t agreed on what sleep does for people, so it’s hard to agree on the animal equivalent. Studying animal sleep, though, offers the prosp... (p. 23)

Odors from ripening bananas can jam fruit flies’ and mosquitoes’ power to detect carbon dioxide, a new study finds. (p. 14)