All Stories by Susan Milius
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Manatee and whale woes with boat speed limits
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.
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Sperm whales as a carbon sink
New estimates suggest the mammals’ feeding habits help take in carbon.
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All kinds of tired
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 […]
- Health & Medicine
Pigs use mirrors
After some time to play around with a mirror, pigs figure out what to do when they glimpse a reflection of food.
- Animals
Ants in the pants drive away birds
Yellow crazy ants can get so annoying that birds don’t eat their normal fruits, a new study finds.
- Agriculture
Potato famine pathogen packs unusual, sneaky genome
DNA of infamous Phytophthora microbe reveals big, quick-changing zones, possibly the key to the pathogen’s vexing adaptability
- Ecosystems
Google works on a different web
Page ranking system inspires algorithm for predicting food webs’ vulnerability.
- Earth
Oh, rats — there go the snails
A food fad among introduced rats has apparently crashed a once-thriving population of Hawaii’s famed endemic tree snails.
- Animals
Oops, missed that fossil iridescence
Nanostructures on a preserved feather offer the first fossil evidence of bird colors not from pigments, a new study says.
- Animals
Fruity whiff may inspire new mosquito repellents
Odors from ripening bananas can jam fruit flies’ and mosquitoes’ power to detect carbon dioxide, a new study finds.
- Animals
Back off, extinct moa
A New Zealand tree’s peculiar leaves may have served as defenses against long-gone giant birds.
- Animals
Vocal abilities lost, found and drowned out
Reports from the meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union
