A meta-analysis of 143 bird species finds huge variation in parental responses to chicks' begging signals, and shows that parental strategies depend on environmental factors, such as the predictability and quality of food supplies.
Nature doi: 10.1038/nature17317
These barrel sponges have one hell of a pedigree. (credit: Albert Kok/Wikimedia)
The earliest chapters in the history of life are in some ways the most interesting, but also the hardest to read. The pages are badly stained and tattered, and the print was terribly small to begin with. You can occasionally trip on a dinosaur...
Animals are grouped into ~35 ‘phyla’ based upon the notion of distinct body plans. Morphological and molecular analyses have revealed that a stage in the middle of development—known as the phylotypic period—is conserved among species within some phyla. Although these analyses provide evidence for their existence, phyla have also been criticized as lacking an objective definition, and consequently based on arbitrary groupings of animals....
Understanding how ecological communities are organized and how they change through time is critical to predicting the effects of climate change. Recent work documenting the co-occurrence structure of modern communities found that most significant species pairs co-occur less frequently than would be expected by chance. However, little is known about how co-occurrence structure changes through time. Here we evaluate changes in plant and animal...
