Latest Symbiosis Stories
A large-scale UC Davis experiment with ants, lizards and seaweed on a dozen Caribbean islands shows that predicting the effects of environmental change on complex natural ecosystems requires a large laboratory.The study, which was led by UC Davis ecologist Jonah Piovia-Scott, is described in today's issue of the journal Science.Piovia-Scott said previous studies have found that environmental changes (such as shifts in temperature, precipitation or storm severity) can affect ecosystems by...
Research by the University of Exeter has revealed that ants have a big impact on their local environment as a result of their activity as 'ecosystem engineers' and predators.The study, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology, found that ants have two distinct effects on their local environment.Firstly, through moving of soil by nest building activity and by collecting food they affect the level of nutrients in the soil. This can indirectly impact the local populations of many animal...
Studying ants to find out how colony size affects patterns of behavior and energy useHow does size affect the organization and physiology of superorganisms such as bacterial communities, insect colonies or human cities? James Waters and Tate Holbrook, graduate students in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University, work on answering this question by studying how colony size affects the patterns of behavior and energy use in ant colonies.Social insect colonies are excellent study...
The world's corals not only display stunning beauty and diversity "“ they also have rhythm, man. And that helps to keep them going through the lonely low-Â"point of the night, when their partner robs them blind.That corals, among the simplest of Earth's creatures, have some curiously human-Â"like attributes is emerging in a fresh set of revelations from by an international team of Australian and Israeli coral geneticists at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies which...
Four species of bumblebees that were once abundant in the United States are now close to becoming extinct, researchers said on Monday in a study confirming that the important insects are being affected globally. The researchers documented a 96 percent downfall in the numbers of the four species, and also confirmed their range had shrunk by as much as 87 percent. "We provide incontrovertible evidence that multiple Bombus species have experienced sharp population declines at the national...
Penn State researchers have found that native pollinators, like wild bees and wasps, are infected by the same viral diseases as honey bees and that these viruses are transmitted via pollen. Their research published on December 22nd in PLoS ONE, an online open-access journal for the communication of all peer-reviewed scientific and medical research.This multi-institutional study provides new insights into viral infections in native pollinators, suggesting that viral diseases may be key factors...
Researchers from Imperial College London and Queen Mary, University of London have created an online database that allows users to see flower colors through the eyes of a bee.The database, which is entitled the Floral Reflectance Database (FReD), is referenced in the latest edition of the journal PLoS One as "a valuable new tool for researchers interested in the colors of flowers and their association with pollinator color vision, containing raw spectral reflectance data for a large...
When their razor-sharp mandibles wear out, leaf-cutter ants change jobs, remaining productive while letting their more efficient sisters take over cutting, say researchers from two Oregon universities.Their study -- appearing online ahead of regular publication in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology -- provides a glimpse of nature's way of providing for its displaced workers."This study demonstrates an advantage of social living that we are familiar with -- humans that can no...
New Findings Suggest Species' Interactions Don't Always Promote DiversityBiologists have long thought that interactions between plants and pollinating insects hasten evolutionary changes and promote biological diversity. However, new findings show that some interactions between plants and pollinators are less likely to increase diversity than previously thought, and in some instances, reduce it.Findings, published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology, show that local populations of one of...
Monash University researchers have discovered that male Australian desert goby fish are surprisingly strategic when it comes to courtship, adapting their tactics depending on the frequency of their contact with females.Attracting females involves significant time, energy and exposure to predation and previous research has indicated that male gobies are more likely to court larger females due to the number of eggs they carry compared with their smaller counterparts.However, new research,...
Latest Symbiosis Reference Libraries
Image Credit: Miles Wu/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 2.0) The sabae clownfish is a very rare species in the wild and is aggressive, especially as it matures. It is found in the northern Indian Ocean around India, Sri Lanka, Arabian Peninsula, Andaman Islands, Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Maldive Islands. This fish inhabits lagoons and coastal waters around reefs, at a depth range of 6 - 75 feet. This species of fish is the most popular fish for home aquariums. The body of the sabae clownfish is...
Image Caption: Amphiprion polymnus at Tasik Ria House reef, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Credit: Jens Peterson/Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 3.0) Saddleback clownfish are found in harbors and lagoons with a soft or sandy bottom, around reefs at depths from 6 - 90 feet. This fish is native to the Western Pacific, around China, Viet Nam, Gulf of Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, northern Australia, New Guinea, New Britain, and the Solomon Islands. The body of the saddleback clownfish ranges in color...
The convict blenny lives in tunnels around coastal reefs and in shallow lagoons of the Western South Pacific, mainly from the Philippines to the Solomon Islands. The young of this fish will often swim in schools around the reef heads and ledges so tightly packed together they will look like one organism. This species, sometimes called a blenny and sometimes called a goby, actually it is neither. It is in a classification alone with one other species called a worm blenny. The convict blenny...
The Polydnaviruses (PDV) are a family of insect viruses that contain two genera: Ichnoviruses (IV) and Bracoviruses (BV). The ichnoviruses occur in ichneumonid wasps and bracoviruses in braconid wasps. The virus is composed of multiple segments of double-stranded superhelical DNA packaged in capsid proteins and a double layer or single layer envelope. The full genome of the virus is integrated into the genome of the wasps and the virus only replicates in specific cells in the female...
The ants, one of the most successful groups of insects, are of particular interest because they form advanced colonies, and can constitute up to 15 percent of the total animal biomass of a tropical rainforest. They belong to the order Hymenoptera and are close relatives of the vespoid wasps. Ants appear in amber, found in central New Jersey, believed to be from the Cretaceous period. It is thought that they evolved from the wasps that had appeared during the Jurassic period. They are...
