SciGlow | All Science News In One Place
SciGlow is a newsletter of science stories from the major research labs. Headlines link to in-depth articles and editorials. SciGlow keeps scientists and others up-to-date on current research.
Male lava lizards are sensitive to the timing of their opponents’ responses during contest displays, with quicker responses being perceived as more aggressive, a study in Behavioural Ecology and Sociobiology suggests. To avoid injury from male-to-male contests, some animal species display behaviours such as color changes or sequences of movements that showcase body size and … Read more
An alternative method for monitoring endangered lions in India could improve estimates of their abundance and help inform conservation policy and management decisions. Keshab Gogoi and colleagues at the Wildlife Institute of India present their findings in the open-access journal PLOS ONE on February 19, 2020. Conservation practices have enabled Asiatic lions to recover from a population … Read more
The state of unified perception characteristic of a conscious state in humans appears to require widespread coordination of the forebrain and thus, the existence of a physical and anatomical substrate for this coordination. The mammalian claustrum, a thin sheet of brain tissue hidden beneath the inner layers of the neocortex, is widely interconnected with the … Read more
Research into the toxin of the world’s only venomous primate, the slow loris, is shedding light on the potential origins of the allergic qualities of cats. An international team, led by University of Queensland’s Associate Professor Bryan Fry, has been studying slow lorises at the Cikananga Wildlife Rescue Centre in Indonesia. The bite of the … Read more
From the long necks of giraffes that help them reach treetops to the flexibility of a cheetah’s spine that help it go from zero to sixty in three seconds, mammals not only have the figurative backbone to do amazing things but, more importantly, they have the literal one. But they weren’t always that way. A … Read more
Conservationists should be wary of assuming that genetic diversity loss in wildlife is always caused by humans, as new research published today by international conservation charity ZSL (Zoological Society of London) reveals that, in the case of a population of southern African lions (Panthera leo), it’s likely caused by ecological rather than human factors. Published … Read more
In chimpanzee society, males spend their entire lives in the group where they were born, cooperating to defend their territory, while females tend to move away. But some chimp females seem less willing to cut the apron strings. New findings from researchers at Duke University and North Carolina State University show that female chimpanzees with … Read more
In mammals, pair bonds are very rare, one of the few exceptions being the red titi monkeys of South America. These relatively small tree dwellers live in pairs or small family groups and are characterized by the fact that the males take intensive care of their offspring. A team of researchers from the German Primate … Read more
It’s no secret there’s a close relationship between humans and our microbiomes – the communities of microbes that live in and on us. In fact, researchers can usually guess what an animal’s gut microbiome might look like by studying closely related species. Or at least, that’s what they thought. It turns out that while there’s … Read more
Meerkat clans perform a ‘war dance’ to frighten opponents and protect their territory, according to a new UCL and University of Cambridge study. Published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, this is the first empirical study to reveal intergroup aggression. The researchers, who monitored hundreds of these intergroup encounters over 11 years, show that meetings … Read more