Can an airport ever be good for the environment? Dayton International is trying. With a new rewilding initiative, they’re bringing back native prairies, reducing carbon emissions, and cutting down on dangerous bird strikes all at the same time. If you’d like to learn more, you can read my article over at NOVA Next.
It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, and Everything’s OK
by Cara GiaimoScope Correspondent
posted December 2, 2014 at 3:54 pm
“Sophisticated” avian malaria parasites can sense mosquito bites
by Anna NowogrodzkiScope Correspondent
posted October 7, 2014 at 7:50 pm
It’s only a single cell, but the avian malaria parasite is able to quickly detect when a mosquito bites its host and respond by reproducing faster, according to a new study.
This is part of the parasites’ strategy for surviving seasons with no mosquitoes. The parasites “remain dormant, like bears during the winter,” said Dr. Sylvain Gandon, an evolutionary epidemiologist at Université de Montpellier and an author of the study. “Do nothing, wait for better times. And it’s a problem for the parasites to know when the better times are coming.” The avian malaria parasite shares this survival challenge with human malaria parasites that live in places with a mosquito-free dry season.
Microbe Finds Hydrogen Yummy
by Jennifer RoodScope Correspondent
posted February 7, 2014 at 9:18 am
Deep in swampy salt marshes, among the knotted roots of the cord grass, lives a special microbe—the first living organism that scientists have ever directly shown to be attracted to hydrogen gas.
“It is a new finding that there is [attraction] to hydrogen,” said Reinhard Wirth of the University of Regensburg, who was not involved in the recently published research. “This is the first time this has been reported.” Full Article »
Methanocaldococcus jannaschii courtesy of B. Boonyaratanakornkit & D.S. Clark, Chemical Engineering, G. Vrdoljak Electron Microscope Lab, University of California Berkeley.
Spider Populations Flourish When Birds Leave
by Sarah YuScope Correspondent
posted October 2, 2012 at 1:22 pm
When the birds are away, the spiders will play, a recent study in the journal PloS One has found.
A press release describes the forests of the island of Guam, situated in the western Pacific ocean, as “eerily quiet” without the calls of songbirds, but spiders are now silently proliferating in the jungle landscape.
The brown treesnake, Boiga irregularis, an invasive species that was introduced onto the island during World War II, preyed easily upon Guam’s birds and their eggs, which were previously unaccustomed to predation, resulting in the extinction of ten out of the twelve native bird species.
Haldre Rogers of Rice University has discovered that the over thirty-year absence of insectivorous birds on Guam has dramatically increased spider populations in limestone karst forests, a jungle ecosystem where trees grow directly on limestone bedrock.
One of the benefits of studying bird exclusion on Guam is that the entire island has been without birds for a long period of time and so is a study site without the problems that small-scale bird exclusion experiments wrestle with, such as systems not having enough time to reach equilibrium or spiders and their prey migrating in and out of study cages used to keep birds out. Full Article »
Banana Spider
Source: Wikimedia Commons
