Biosentients - Science Biology… etc

Four swarms of Asian bees found in Cairns have been cleared of carrying the dreaded Varroa destructor mite but the intruders themselves could pose the beginning of a serious threat to Australian honey bee populations. Asian bees are known to have found their way into Australian ports at least half a dozen times in the last decade……..

The mammalian order bats (Chiroptera) has two suborders, microbats (Microchiroptera) and fruit bats or flying foxes (Megachiroptera). In contrast to microbats, fruit bats (Fig. 1) do not echolocate. They have large eyes and pronounced visual centres in the brain. Fruit bats need a good sense of vision, because when they forage at night for nectar and fruit, they orient by vision and the sense of smell. During the flights to the foraging grounds at dusk and the return to the daytime roost at dawn, the animals navigate solely by vision. On moonless nights, fruit bats cannot fly and stay hungry. Visual navigation at twilight and sometimes also during the daytime did not fit the older view that fruit bats only possess rods, the photoreceptors for night vision. This prompted Brigitte Müller and Leo Peichl of the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt/Main and Steven Goodman from The Field Museum for Natural History in Chicago to study the photoreceptors of fruit bats with modern histological methods……..

Mothers know best when it comes to dressing their children, at least among side-blotched lizards, a common species in the western United States. Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have observed that female side-blotched lizards are able to induce different color patterns in their offspring in response to social cues, “dressing” their progeny in patterns they will wear for the rest of their lives. The mother’s influence gives her progeny the patterns most likely to ensure success under the conditions they will encounter as adults……..

Seen thundering across the landscape during an aerial survey, more than 1.3 million white-eared kob, tiang (African antelope), and mongalla gazelle are thriving in Southern Sudan, despite all odds. An estimated 8,000 elephants, concentrated mainly in the Sudd, the largest freshwater wetland in Africa, have also been observed. Researchers are astonished at the latest news: Based on experiences in other war-torn regions such as Mozambique and Angola, they believed wildlife had vanished from this area……..

New research from the University of Alberta and the Canadian Forest Service has revealed the humble rove beetle may actually have a lot to tell us about the effects of harvesting on forests species. Rove beetles can be used as indicators of clear-cut harvesting and regeneration practices and can be used as an example as to how species react to harvesting. It has been observed that after an area of forest was harvested, the a number of forest species, including rove beetles, decreased dramatically. As the forest regenerated, it never fully replicated the full characteristics of the older forest it replaced……..

Research on one of the oldest-living mammals - the bowhead whale - has helped preserve a primary food source for Eskimos in the far reaches of Alaska, and also may provide a useful tool for studying genetic variation in other migratory animals. The bowhead whale, devastated in the 19th and early 20th centuries by commercial whaling fleets, has been a food staple for Eskimos and other indigenous arctic peoples dating to prehistoric times. Due in part to research done by Purdue University professor John Bickham, the International Whaling Commission ruled last week to allow Eskimos to harvest 56 whales per year, the same quota that had been in place but had expired……..

Being a devoted husband and father is not enough to keep an avian marriage together for the Nazca booby, a long-lived seabird found in the Galapagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. A number of Nazca booby females switch mates after successfully raising a chick, as per a Wake Forest University study scheduled for publication in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences June 13……..

A grateful thanks to Mbc of Germany for contributing today’s image via the UBC BG BPotD Submissions forum in this thread. Mbc made this photograph while on a mountainside hike near Kyoto, ………

It could be an artist’s depiction of someone’s stomach before and after a rather decadent meal. But it is a 3-D cryoelectron microscope reconstruction of the cross-section of a virus, before and after cramming itself full of its own DNA. The virus, phi29, has a tiny motor that pumps its DNA into the capsid-outer shell-during the assembly process. The potential energy of the tightly coiled DNA may help phi29 inject its genetic material into the bacterial cells it infects. Now a team led by physicists at the University of California, San Diego has used laser tweezers to measure the forces exerted by the motor as it pushes the DNA into the capsid……..

Global warming and the destruction of natural habitats will lead to significant declines and extinctions in the world’s 8,750 terrestrial bird species over the next century, as per a research studyconducted by biologists at the University of California, San Diego and Princeton University. Their study, the first global assessment of how climate change and habitat destruction may interact to impact the distribution of a large group of vertebrates over the next century, appears in the June 5 issue of the journal PLoS Biology……..