ScienceDaily: Plants & Animals News

Scientists find strongest natural material known to humans Posted: 17 Feb 2015 05:27 PM PST Limpet teeth might be the strongest natural material known to humans, a new study has found. Limpets -- small aquatic snail-like creatures with conical shells -- have teeth with biological structures so strong they could be copied to make cars, boats and planes of the future.

Impact of Deepwater Horizon Oil on beach microbial communities Posted: 17 Feb 2015 12:40 PM PST Using advanced genomic identification techniques, researchers studying the impact of the Deepwater Horizon spill on communities of beach microbes saw a succession of organisms and identified population changes in specific organisms that marked the progress of the oil's breakdown.

Humans altering Adriatic ecosystems more than nature, study shows Posted: 17 Feb 2015 10:12 AM PST The ecosystems of the Adriatic Sea have weathered natural climate shifts for 125,000 years, but humans could be rapidly altering this historically stable biodiversity hot spot, a new study shows.

Time for a bold dingo experiment, researchers say Posted: 17 Feb 2015 09:27 AM PST Sturt National Park in Australia is the ideal site to test whether dingoes can play a role in restoring biodiversity and degraded rangelands. The future survival of large carnivores depends on our understanding of their role, researchers say.

Even animals compose: What it means to be a musical species Posted: 17 Feb 2015 09:27 AM PST Music is found in all human cultures and thus appears to be part of our biology and not simply a cultural phenomenon. One approach to studying the biology of music is to examine other species to see if they share some of the features that make up human musicality.

Plants survive better through mass extinctions than animals Posted: 17 Feb 2015 05:39 AM PST At least five mass extinction events have profoundly changed the history of life on Earth. But a new study shows that plants have been very resilient to those events.

Bacteria jump between species more easily than previously thought Posted: 17 Feb 2015 05:37 AM PST Bacteria may be able to jump between host species far easier than was previously thought, a new study suggests. Researchers discovered that a single genetic mutation in a strain of bacteria infectious to humans enables it jump species to also become infectious to rabbits. The discovery has major implications for how we assess the risk of bacterial diseases that can pass between humans and animals. It is well known that relatively few mutations are required to support the transmission of viruses -- such as influenza -- from one species to another. Until now it was thought that the process was likely to be far more complicated for bacteria.