The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : Evolutionary Biologist The Pet Tree House - Where Pets Are Family Too : Evolutionary Biologist
Showing posts with label Evolutionary Biologist. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Evolutionary Biologist. Show all posts

Monday, March 18, 2019

Massive Tarantula Dragging Opossum To Its Doom Is Pure Nightmare Fuel


Australia has its fair share of oversized arachnids, but even down under, we’ve never seen a spider as fearsome as this.

A video taken recently in the Amazon shows a tarantula likely 10 inches in diameter, making a meal out of a young opossum. The auspicious encounter was recorded by biologists working with the University of Michigan, studying rare predator-prey interactions in the lowland rainforests of the Andean foothills, Fox News reports.

“This is an underappreciated source of mortality among vertebrates,” Daniel Rabosky, an evolutionary biologist at U of M who leads a team of researchers to the Amazon rainforest about once or twice a year, said in an online statement. “A surprising amount of death of small vertebrates in the Amazon is likely due to arthropods such as big spiders and centipedes.”

To read more on this story, click here: Massive Tarantula Dragging Opossum To Its Doom Is Pure Nightmare Fuel

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Friday, May 1, 2015

Conservationists and Scientists Predict That 2.8 Percent of the World’s Species Are Currently Going Extinct Under Current Climate Conditions


Conservationists and scientists have long predicted that climate change would push species around the world into extinction. Now comes word that the problem may be even worse than was previously realized. According to a paper published Thursday in the journal Science, the rate of extinction will dramatically speed up for every degree temperatures rise.

“If we follow through the business as usual in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, then we get to the point where one in six species are threatened with extinction from climate change,” said the paper’s author, Mark Urban, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Connecticut.

Urban’s research analyzed more than 130 previously published papers covering how climate change and other factors, such as habitat loss, will affect species extinctions. The previous papers covered certain groups of species or specific geographic ranges but didn’t look at the planet as a whole. By conducting a meta-analysis of that earlier research, Urban said he was able to come up with an “an overall picture of extinction risk.”

Urban said he expected to find that climate change would be one of the major factors affecting species extinctions in the coming decades, but he was surprised to find out how quickly that risk would accelerate.

According to his calculations, 2.8 percent of the world’s species are currently predicted to go extinct under current conditions. If global temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius, that risk will increase to 5.2 percent. If temperatures rise one more degree, the risk balloons to 8.5 percent.

And if we continue on our current trajectory, in which global temperatures are anticipated to rise 4.3 degrees Celsius, Urban calculated that the risk increases even more, to the point where 16 percent of the world’s species will go extinct.

Urban said his analysis illustrates that climate change will pose many dangers beyond the ones we talk about the most, such as sea-level rise and drought. “There’s another impact, and that’s on our biodiversity,” he said.

The risk that species face will vary around the world according to their habitats. Species in North America and Europe, Urban found, will face a 5 percent and 6 percent risk of extinction, respectively.

That risk leaps upward in areas with greater levels of native biodiversity. Australia and New Zealand will each lose 14 percent of their species, Urban calculated.

South America will be hit hardest—23 percent of the continent’s unique species will go extinct if the rate of climate change does not slow.

Outside of specific regions, species with limited ranges or a limited ability to move to new habitats will also face a higher extinction risk. These include amphibians and lizards, as well as many plants, insects, and mammals.

“One example is the American pika,” Urban said. The species lives on mountains in very specific temperature ranges. Moving upward as ground temperatures rise shrinks their available habitat and food. They can’t move down the mountain or cross the plains to another mountain because they die if they get too warm.

Urban found that for many species with limited ability to adapt to new habitats, the risk of extinction ranges from 80 to 100 percent.

Even with this meta-analysis, Urban found that more data will provide an even better picture of the future. Particularly needed is more information about species in Asia and how climate change will affect that region, he said.

More information is also required about species that have not been fully studied, as well as how climate change will affect specific regions. He said that will help us “to pinpoint those species like the American pika that are most at risk and then try to implement conservation strategies to protect the most at-risk species.”

Urban said this study should be a wake-up call for the international community to take climate change’s effect on wildlife seriously.

“Biodiversity is the foundation of our economy, our future, our health, and our food security,” he said.



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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind


YouTube/National Geographic Applying psychology to the topic of animal cuteness might seem like using a hammer on an egg. Can't we agree that something is adorable just because it is?

But as with beauty, cuteness is in the eye of the beholder, and arguments abound as to why (some) infants and (some) animals manage to be so endearing to the human observer.

"Pleasure is not something that natural selection doles out without a reason," writes evolutionary biologist David Barash for Aeon Magazine, "and we would expect that reason to be intimately connected with maximizing fitness."

To read more on this story, click here: Our Interest in Unlikely Animal Friendships Reveals Something Surprising About Humankind FOLLOW US!
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