In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description.

Note: this paper is from 2011, if you know a relevant more recent one, could you please share?

While pipefishes and seahorses are famous for male pregnancy, the family is split by how the males carry their young. Many pipefish—and all seahorses—are "tail brooders," carrying eggs on the tail in pouches.

Another group of pipefish, the "trunk brooders," carry eggs exposed directly on the belly.

“It’s by far the most exciting time to be a biologist, ever, in my opinion — maybe with the exception of going right back to Darwin,” said Sean Stankowski (opens a new tab), an evolutionary geneticist at University College London. “Even when we understood that organisms were programmed by genetic code, we could really never access that. Now, we’re looking at every single [nucleotide molecule] — A, T, G, and C [adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine] — in the genome.”

An analysis of genomic ecotypes (opens a new tab) by Johannesson, Stankowski, and other researchers explains how some species can maintain the DNA sequences for multiple adaptations, allowing evolutionary processes to effectively select among ecotypes as environmental conditions change — sometimes within only a few generations. The data also suggests that some canonically diverse groups of species, including Darwin’s finches, may not be separate species at all, but rather different ecotypes of the same species.

...

An inversion happens when a portion of DNA from the chromosome breaks off, rotates 180 degrees, and plugs back into the chromosome in the reverse orientation. After inversion, a block of genes sits in one orientation on one chromosome, and in the opposite orientation on the other. This effectively prevents recombination from happening again in that region, and locks that group of genes together in a block. If those genes are somehow related, this can create a supergene, or multiple genes that act as a single unit. The snail traits for thick shells and evasive behavior to hide from crabs, for instance, become linked so that they will be inherited together in subsequent generations.

“It’s like if you had a deck of cards,” said Patrik Nosil (opens a new tab), an evolutionary geneticist at the French National Center for Scientific Research who studies speciation and ecotypes of stick insects. “With normal genetics, you shuffle that deck completely — all 52 cards. Whereas with these chromosomal inversions, you have a part of the deck that refuses to shuffle, so you can never change the order of the cards in there. That’s the part that controls the traits that make the ecotypes different.”

Professor Masanori Kohda has been studying fish for 3 decades. His groundbreaking paper in 2019 showed that fish are capable of passing the famous mirror test. But more importantly, his research shows that how we have tried to test for consciousness over the past half century may be wrong.

In this video, we look at how he came to these conclusions.

The 2019 study: If a fish can pass the mark test, what are the implications for consciousness and self-awareness testing in animals?

Study shifts our understanding of fog from a sterile mist to a temporary aquatic habitat

For over two years, the research team followed 28 wild chimpanzees of all ages, from infants to older adults, at the Budongo Conservation Field Station in Uganda. From morning to late afternoon, they observed the daily lives of the apes in detail, recording the behavior of focal individuals as well as others within five meters. This allowed them to track what and whom chimpanzees observed closely.

The third year of a global Ocean Census has revealed 1,121 potentially new-to-science marine species, including a worm that lives inside a “glass castle,” a ghost shark, and a carnivorous sponge.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/50686

It has a fox-like snout, webbed toes and a thick tail. It’s called the short-eared dog (Atelocynus microtis), but also the ghost dog (perro fantasma in Spanish) in Bolivia, and the Amazonian dog. It’s one of the world’s least-known canids and one of the least frequently sighted carnivores in Latin America. Now, though, a study conducted over the course of more than two decades — from 2001 to 2024 — in Bolivia has revealed more than 4,600 camera-trap images that show how it lives, the places it inhabits, and why this species is so dependent on South America’s forests remaining intact to survive. The research underscores that the ghost dog is very much an Amazonian species, and in particular a forest one. In Bolivia, it can be spotted in the country’s continuous Amazonian forests, in the northern portion of the department of La Paz, but also in the department of Pando, in northern and northeastern Beni, and in the far north and northeast of Santa Cruz. It’s also found in the pre-Amazonian forests of the Andes mountain range, also called piedmont forests, at elevations up to 750 meters (2,460 feet). Robert Wallace, a British biologist from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) in Bolivia and a co-author of the new study, said the team conducted a systematic review of published and unpublished distribution records of the species in Bolivia. Throughout the 23 years, they also carried out 34 intensive camera-trap surveys in the lowland areas of the Greater Madidi-Tambopata Landscape (in…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/50290

According to monitoring with tracking collars by the Mount Elgon Foundation (MEF), last year at least 60 elephants crossed from Kenya into the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon, a vast volcanic mountain that straddles the border, returning to a part of their natural range where they’ve not been seen for over 40 years. MEF funds community projects aimed at reducing forest degradation and raising awareness of environmental issues, as well as a team of 18 community scouts on the Kenyan side of the mountain, part of the East African Wild Life Society’s Mount Elgon Elephant Project. MEF’s chair, Chris Powles, told Mongabay that back in 2022, scouts tracked four elephants crossing the Suam river, which marks the border between the two countries. Drone footage of elephants on the Ugandan side of Mount Elgon. Image courtesy of UWA. In an email interview, Powles said a number of factors could explain the elephants’ return, though it’s impossible to say for certain what’s prompted them to reestablish themselves. “[These] include the growth of the elephant population on the Kenya side, the increasing human pressure on the Kenya side, the relative safety for them on the Uganda side as it is all national park (unlike in Kenya),” he wrote. “And, maybe, the elephants alive from the time when others of them were killed in Uganda have now died naturally and so their memory of what happened in Uganda may have passed.” In the late 1970s and 80s, elephants in Uganda and other parts of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8488903

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49120

Reforestation done right could be key to helping rebuild habitat connectivity for Javan leopards on an island with one of the highest human densities on Earth, a new study says. It frames strategic forest restoration — linking up fragmented patches of forest to create contiguous corridors — as offering a rare pathway to balance rapid infrastructure expansion with the conservation of the endangered big cat. “And to implement this, strong commitment from various stakeholders is needed, given Java’s highly fragmented landscape; this will undoubtedly be a significant challenge,” study lead author Andhika C. Ariyanto, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, told Mongabay by email. Camera-trap image of a Javan leopard on Mount Sanggabuana, West Java province. Image courtesy of Sanggabuana Wildlife Ranger. The study is the first to produce an islandwide model of habitat connectivity for the Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), offering conservationists a new tool to identify which forest corridors should be protected and restored as infrastructure development expands across Java, Andhika said. By comparing the impact of new roads and railways with a scenario in which degraded forests were restored, Andhika and his colleagues found that replanting trees in key areas could help reconnect fragmented habitats throughout Java and give wildlife, including leopards, more room to move and survive. They looked at key forest areas used by leopards across Java, an island half the size of the U.S. state of Texas with five times its population. This high human population density has…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8519018

cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/49907

Last September, zoologist and conservationist Bejan Lortkipanidze received a video file from a collaborator, Zurab Gurielidze, the head of Georgia’s Tbilisi Zoo. Gurielidze offered no details, but told his friend to “just watch.” For several moments, Lortkipanidze saw nothing remarkable — just nighttime footage of a high fence topped with razor wire. Then a leopard entered the frame. Lortkipanidze, who heads the Georgian conservation NGO NACRES, was stunned: It was just the third sighting of a Persian leopard (Panthera pardus tulliana) in the south Caucasus nation in 20 years. The footage wasn’t from a wildlife camera trap. It came from a standard CCTV camera that surveilled the perimeter of a new breeding enclosure for endangered Caucasian red deer (Cervus elaphus maral) in Algeti National Park, situated an hour west of Tbilisi. The video quickly circulated around the conservation community. Vazha Kochiashvili, a biologist with WWF Caucasus, saw it: It was sent to him by the man tasked with checking the deer enclosure footage for Georgia’s National Agency of Wildlife, Sergo Tabagari, who called him immediately after he saw the cat while reviewing footage. Kochiashvili said he had a hunch and asked his friend: “Does the leopard have three legs?” It did. The male leopard’s name is Aren and, over the last few years, he’s roamed across at least two international borders. Persian leopards once traversed a vast territory that lies between Russia, the Middle East and the Caspian and Black seas. They’re wide-ranging animals, and Aren’s journey underscores the myriad…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via This RSS Feed.

Rice plants and Venus flytraps share something in common that was not scientifically documented until recently. Using a faint smell to lure caterpillars into a trap, rice plants killed early-stage fall armyworm larvae by trapping them in a spikelet, the part at the end of a rice panicle where individual grains develop.