My Picks from ScienceDaily

Testosterone Turns Male Junco Birds Into Blustery Hunks -- And Bad Dads:

The ability to ramp up testosterone production appears to drive male dark-eyed juncos to find and win mates, but it comes with an evolutionary cost. Big fluctuations in testosterone may also cause males to lose interest in parenting their own young, scientists have learned.

Blind To Beauty: How And Where Do We Process Attractiveness?:

Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but according to research conducted by a UBC medical student, eye candy fails to find a sweet tooth in patients with a rare disorder.

After Drought, Diversity Dries Up And Ponds All Look The Same:

An ecologist at Washington University in St. Louis has discovered that after ponds dry up through drought in a region, when they revive, the community of species in each pond tends to be very similar to one another, like so many suburban houses made of ticky tacky.

A Gene Divided Reveals The Details Of Natural Selection:

In a molecular tour de force, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have provided an exquisitely detailed picture of natural selection as it occurs at the genetic level.

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Some Tropical Birds Depend Completely On Army Ants To Flush Out Prey: In the jungles of Central and South America, a group of birds has evolved a unique way of finding food -- by following hordes of army ants and letting them do all the work. Bone Structure 'Vastly Different' Than Previously…
Black-throated green warbler, Dendroica virens. Image appears here with the kind permission of the photographer, Pamela Wells. Click image for larger view in its own window. Birds in Science Wendy Reed and her research team's study found that male dark-eyed juncos, Junco hyemalis, with extra…
Following (below the fold) are a few of the bird posters that I saw yesterday at SICB. Class. Substantial data exists on the behavioral endocrinology of temperate-zone birds, yet ornithologists are just beginning to examine and compare tropical birds to temperate zone birds. In a recent…
Hummingbird 'Tag' Suggests Fragmentation May Be Part Of Pollination Crisis: To find out the cause of what's being called a global "pollination crisis," researchers at Oregon State University have successfully attached an electronic tracking device to a hummingbird for the first time - and the…