ecology – The News Desk

Here’s Scientific Proof Your Cat Will Eat Almost Anything

12Dec

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Technology

Here’s Scientific Proof Your Cat Will Eat Almost Anything

Don’t let their fluff fool you: Your cat was built for murder. Felines, no matter how chonky, eepy, or boopable, are remarkably adaptable obligate carnivores, down to eat just about anything that fits in their mouth.Well-intentioned (or … threatening?) gifts of dead birds, rats, and lizards are familiar to outdoor cat owners—even my shockingly uncoordinated indoor cat has killed a spider or two in her day. But an analysis published today in Nature Communications, led by Auburn University ecologist Christopher Lepczyk, reveals that there’s shockingly little that cats don’t eat.Compiling evidence from a century of research from across the globe, Lepczyk’s team identified over 2,000 animal species eaten by cats—and that’s only what scientists have recorded so far. Of those species, 347 are a...

Why one should feed black crow as per Hindu Shastras

26Oct

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Entertainment

Why one should feed black crow as per Hindu Shastras

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Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest

17Oct

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Technology

Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest

Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling from 10, 100, [or] 1,000 sound recorders is much easier than training 10, 100, 1,000 people to go to a forest at the same time,” says Donoso.“The need for this kind of rigorous assessment is enormous. It will never be cost-effective to have a kind of boots-on-the-ground approach,” agrees Eddie Game, the Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist and director of conservation for the Asia Pacific region, who wasn’t involved in th...

This Heat Is Shaking the Very Foundation of the Ocean Food Web

2Aug

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Technology

This Heat Is Shaking the Very Foundation of the Ocean Food Web

Secondly, the warmer water gets, the less dense it becomes. At the surface, you end up with a band of hot water, with cooler waters in the depths, a layering known as stratification. “If you've ever gone swimming in a lake in the summer, if you're at the surface, it's nice and warm, and then you dive down and it gets cold pretty fast,” says Michael Behrenfeld, an ocean ecologist at Oregon State University. “That's the stratification layer that you're going through.”In the ocean, this warm water acts like a cap that interrupts critical ecological processes. Normally, nutrients well up from the depths, providing food for the phytoplankton floating at the surface. Stratification prevents that. In addition, winds typically blow across the surface and mix that water down deeper, also bringing ...

Wild Donkeys Are on the Vanguard of Ukraine’s Ecological Recovery

23Jul

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Technology

Wild Donkeys Are on the Vanguard of Ukraine’s Ecological Recovery

The war, unsurprisingly, has made conservation a lot harder. Oleg Dyakov, a rewilding officer from Rewilding Ukraine’s head office in Odesa and one of the organization’s cofounders, recounts the hazards his teams have faced with a casual frustration. Marine mines drifting in from the Black Sea stalled the release of fallow deer, and monitoring activities of Dalmatian Pelicans were limited to binoculars and telescopes because parts of the Delta were restricted by the Ukrainian government. (In peacetime, they’d have been able to carry out more accurate counts through the assistance of drones.)The Askania Nova reserve—Ukraine’s oldest and largest biosphere, located on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River—has been under Russian occupation since last spring. Employees at the park kept up their...

As I See It: Money is available to clean the Merrimack | Columns

10Jul

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Money

As I See It: Money is available to clean the Merrimack | Columns

Those concerned about pollution in the Merrimack River should be aware that billions of federal dollars are available now to help clean the waterway. President Biden’s infrastructure bill included close to $50 billion for communities to improve and expand their sewage treatment operations and clean-water facilities.It is the largest amount approved to clean rivers, lakes and the oceans since the Clean Water Act of 1972.Now is the time for elected officials and clean-water professionals in the Merrimack Valley to launch the complicated process of obtaining some of this funding. The 117-mile-long Merrimack is regularly fouled by combined sewer overflows...