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Evolution & Behaviour

showing 21-25 of 160 breaks

Notes from underground: naked mole-rats and vocal dialects

Naked mole-rats are highly unusual rodents. These long-lived, cold-blooded mammals are immune to certain types of pain, highly resistant to cancer and able to survive up to 18 minutes without oxygen. They have a highly cooperative social lifestyle, rare among mammals but common in insects... click to read more

  • Alison J. Barker | Research Scientist at Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin, Germany
Views 5918
Reading time 3.5 min
published on Mar 1, 2022
When it comes to the giant bacterium Achromatium, everything is everywhere

Bacteria of the genus Achromatium are known since the 1890s. They occupy the uppermost layer of aquatic sediments at the boundary between the oxic water and the anoxic benthos where Achromatium uses sulfide for energy. Achromatium is recognizable by two distinctive features: (1) it is... click to read more

  • Danny Ionescu | Research Scientist at 1Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Alte Fischerhütte 2, D-16775 Stechlin, Germany
  • Luca Zoccarato | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB), Berlin, Germany
  • Sina Schorn | PhD Student at Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany
Views 2964
Reading time 4 min
published on Jan 28, 2022
Snake uses its split jaws as a knife and fork

Many animals use their limbs to handle their food and obtain edible pieces from it. To take a relatable example, we humans peel fruits, fillet fish, and break crabs with our hands and tools. In contrast, most animals that lack limbs (like snakes) would be... click to read more

  • Yosuke Kojima | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, Japan
Views 4881
Reading time 4 min
published on Dec 10, 2021
The puzzling history of South American mammals

When the Isthmus of Panama formed, it connected North and South America, allowing the interchange of the previously separated faunas from two continents. A puzzling aspect of this interchange is that North American mammals seem to be more successful. The fossil record shows more mammals... click to read more

  • Juan D. Carrillo | Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, CNRS, Sorbonne Université, Paris, France; Gothenburg Global Biodiversity Centre, Gothenburg, Sweden
Views 3905
Reading time 3.5 min
published on Nov 17, 2021
How does the bat find the tree? With a “cognitive” map!

As soon as the sun sets, hundreds of Egyptian fruit bats leave their cave and fly out, one-by-one, into the night. Their goal: trees bearing ripe fleshy fruits. They must consume more than twice their own body weight of this relatively uncommon and patchily-distributed resource... click to read more

  • David Shohami | PhD graduate at Movement Ecology Lab, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel
Views 2956
Reading time 3.5 min
published on Nov 8, 2021