peer-reviewed research
grrlscientist | August 5, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, begging calls, brood parasitism, coevolution, learning, social shaping, ornithology, Horsfield's Bronze-Cuckoo, Chalcites basalis, Chrysococcyx basalis
Horsfield's Bronze-Cuckoo, Chalcites (Chrysococcyx) basalis,
Capertee Valley, NSW, Australia, September 2003.
Image: Aviceda [larger view].
Brood parasites are birds, fish or insects that deceive unrelated animals of the same species or different species to care for their offspring. By doing so, the parasitic parent is relieved of the energetic demands of constructing a nest and raising its young to…
grrlscientist | August 4, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Macaw Wasting Disease, myenteric ganglioneuritis, proventricular dilatation disease, Bornaviridae, avian bornavirus, negative strand RNA viruses, pan-viral microarray, ViroChip
One pair of the Little Blue (Spix's) Macaw, Cyanopsitta spixii.
This species is extinct in the wild and its captive population consists of roughly 70 to 100 individuals.
Image: Fundação Parque Zoológico de São Paulo (São Paulo Zoo), Brasil.
For more than 30 years, a mysterious disease, known as proventricular dilatation disease (PDD), has sent chills of terror down the spines of…
grrlscientist | August 1, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, speciation, ring species, phylogeography, landscape genetics, crimson rosella, Platycercus elegans, parrots, birds, Australia
Crimson Rosella, Platycercus elegans.
Image: Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
One of the challenges facing those who believe that evolution cannot create new species is explaining the problem of "ring species." Ring species are a group of geographically connected populations that can interbreed with nearby populations, but cannot breed with those populations that exist at each end of the cline (figure A). These populations…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, animal migration, ecology, conservation, habitat destruction, global warming, overexploitation
Image: Makoa Farm Horseback Riding Safaris in Tanzania [larger view].
What do salmon, passenger pigeons, American bison and wildebeest have in common? They all are (or were) migratory, and their populations either are declining or have become extinct. In fact, the populations of nearly all migratory animals, from insects to fishes, birds to mammals, are suffering disproportionate population declines that sedentary species are not experiencing. This is hardly…
grrlscientist | July 30, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dinosaurian soft tissue, fossils, bacterial biofilms, paleontology, endocasts, formerly pyritic framboids, collagen
Figure 1. EDS spectrum of framboid. EDS spectrum of framboid showing an iron-oxygen signature. Pt is from coating for SEM. Area in red box was scanned for elements. [larger view].
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0002808.
Some of you might remember a paper published in Science that rocked the paleontological world by revealing that a broken thigh bone from Tyrannosaurus rex contained soft tissue. When this soft tissue was analyzed, it was identified as…
grrlscientist | July 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Bombus impatiens, Bumblebees, pathogen spillover, epidemiology, pollinating insects, greenhouses
Common Eastern Bumblebee, Bombus impatiens.
This species is often relied upon to pollinate commercial food crops,
such as tomatoes, that are often grown in agricultural greenhouses.
Image: Wikipedia Commons [larger view].
A mysterious decline in North American bumblebee populations is apparently the result of "spillover" of pathogen-infected commercial bumblebees, Bombus species, from agricultural greenhouses where tomatoes, peppers and cucumbers are commonly grown…
grrlscientist | July 22, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, dichromatism, mating system, plumage color, sex allocation, eclectus parrots, Eclectus roratus, ornithology, birds, avian, parrots
Elektra, my female Solomon Islands eclectus parrot, Eclectus roratus solomonensis.
This is the smallest and most distinctively marked of all the subspecies of eclectus parrots.
Image: GrrlScientist 4 July 2008 [larger view].
Some of you might recall the recent story about scientists learning to identify plumage coloration from fossilized feathers. This might seem a sort of esoteric pursuit meant to entertain scientists with access…
grrlscientist | July 15, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, speciation, adaptive radiation, , diversification, ecological opportunity, community assembly, species interactions, North American wood-warblers, Dendroica species, Daniel L. Rabosky
Yellow-rumped warbler, Dendroica coronata, After Hatch Year male.
Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view].
Several questions that motivate my own research and thinking are; How do species arise? Where does all this biodiversity that we see on Earth come from? Does speciation occur as a series of slow and gradual accumulated changes or is it an explosive process that occurs within a…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, birdsong, personality traits, mate choice, sexual selection, risk taking, European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, László Zsolt Garamszegi
Male European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, singing.
Image: Beijershamn Ãland, 23 May 2004 [link].
Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel 1/1000s f/8.0 at 400.0mm iso400.
Most people don't believe that animals possess distinct personalities, although they readily recognize and can describe individual personalities among their family, friends and neighbors and are aware of the importance of individual…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, reciprocal altruism, cooperation, anti-predator behavior, mobbing, birds, pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, Indrikis Krams
Male European pied flycatcher, Ficedula hypoleuca, singing.
Skåne, Sweden.
Image: Omar Brännström, 8 May 2005 [link].
Canon EOS 1D Mark II ,Canon EF 500mm f/4L IS USM 1/640s f/5.6 at 700.0mm iso320.
Meticulous experimental design is crucial to understanding the evolution of specific behaviors, expecially complex and subtle behaviors exhibited by highly intelligent and very social animals, such as birds. One such behavior is mobbing…
grrlscientist | July 10, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, melanosomes, plumage color, feather color, fossil preservation, birds, dinosaur, Jakob Vinther
Male Red-bellied woodpecker, Melanerpes carolinus.
Image: Ken Thomas (Wikipedia) [larger view].
When looking at paintings and reconstructions of fossil birds and dinosaurs, people often ask "how do you know what color they were?" Well, we didn't. However, a new paper was just published in Biology Letters that explores the possibility of deciphering the actual color of fossilized plumage and makes a startling discovery: scientists can identify at least some of the…
grrlscientist | July 9, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, evolution, flatfish, Amphistium, Heteronectes, transitional fossils, missing link, Matt Friedman
During the development of extant flatfishes, such as this plaice, Pleuronectes platessa, one eye has migrated round the head to lie on the same side as the other. So these fishes have an 'eyed' (up) side and a 'blind' (down) side suitable for their bottom-dwelling lifestyle.
Image: KÃ¥re Telnes.
Flounder, turbot, sole, halibut and plaice (pictured above) are more than just a tasty slab of flesh on your plate. They are flatfishes that spend their adult life lying…
grrlscientist | July 8, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, female scientists, science publishing, double-blind review, single-blind review, cultural observation, gender bias, sexism, feminism
A microbiologist at work.
Image: East Bay AWIS.
A few months ago, a controversy occurred in the blogosphere regarding whether scientific papers whose first author is female are discriminated against during the peer-review process, and the suggestion was to institute double-blind peer review as a way to mitigate this possibility. "Double-blinding" as this is sometimes referred to, is a process where a manuscript that has been…
grrlscientist | July 3, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, endangered species, estimating extinction risk, demographic heterogeneity, demographic stochasticity, environmental stochasticity, Mechanistic stochastic models, Brett Melbourne
The endangered pelagic thresher shark, Alopias pelagicus.
More than half of the world's shark species are under the threat of extinction
due to overfishing by humans, especially for sharkfin soup.
Image: Kevin Markey, 2004 (Pacific Shark Research Center).
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released a report in 2007 indicating that more than 16,000 animal species…
grrlscientist | July 2, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, global warming, climate variation, climate change, penguins, El Nino, marine zoning, P. Dee Boersma
Adélie penguins, Pygoscelis adeliae, and chicks.
(a) Adélie penguin chicks may get covered in snow during storms, but beneath the snow their down is warm and dry. (b) When rain falls, downy Adélie chicks can get wet and, when soaked, can become hypothermic and die.
Images: P. Dee Boersma.
According to an article that was just published in the journal BioScience, penguin populations are declining sharply due to the combined effects of overfishing and pollution…
grrlscientist | June 26, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Early Bird Project, Tree of Life, avian evolution, deep avian evolutionary relationships, avian phylogenomics, location cues, Shannon J. Hackett, Rebecca T. Kimball, Sushma Reddy
Basic topology of the evolutionary relationships between birds.
Maximum Likelihood (ML) phylogram reveals the short internodes at the base of Neoaves and highlights certain extreme examples of rate variation across avian lineages. The phylogenetic tree was rooted to crocodilian outgroups (not shown). Branch colors represent major clades supported in this study: land birds (green),…
grrlscientist | June 24, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, Black-throated Blue Warbler, Dendroica caerulescens, social information, habitat selection, vegetation structure, location cues, dispersal, Matthew G Betts
Male Black-throated Blue Warbler, Dendroica caerulescens, with nestlings.
Image: S. Maslowski, USFWS [larger view].
Wild songbirds must be able to quickly discriminate between different habitats so they can choose and establish a suitable breeding territory. Since even older, experienced breeding songbirds lose roughly 50% of their chicks to predators, even a small mistake in choosing a breeding territory…
grrlscientist | June 23, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, scientific ethics, Hippocratic oath, life scientists, corporate culture
I promise never to allow financial gain, competitiveness or ambition cloud my judgment in the conduct of ethical research and scholarship. I will pursue knowledge and create knowledge for the greater good, but never to the detriment of colleagues, supervisors, research subjects or the international community of scholars of which I am now a member.
Scientific misconduct is very expensive, leading to years of wasted research dollars and effort in pursuit of a scientific mirage, and it damages…
grrlscientist | June 21, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, quaternary ammonium compounds, fertility problems, repoductive problems, zoos, aviculture, medicine, disinfectants
I know a fair number of zoos and aviculturists who disinfect the premises occupied by their breeding flocks of birds with quaternary ammonium compounds to prevent the spread of diseases, especially viral disease. But according to a story that just appeared in the top-tier journal, Nature, exposure to the quaternary ammonium compounds, ADBAC (n-alkyl dimethyl benzyl ammonium chloride) and DDAC (didecyl dimethyl ammonium chloride), could cause a sharp…
grrlscientist | June 19, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, phylogeny, British birds, population decline, range contraction, Gavin H Thomas
An adult male Eurasian blackbird, Turdus merula.
Image: Wikipedia commons [larger view].
A paper recently published by British scientist, Gavin Thomas, a population biologist at Imperial College London, finds that British bird species that currently are suffering population declines tend to be close relatives of each other. The reason is obvious: closely related species tend to share many traits, such as very precise habitat requirements, and what's bad for one species is also bad…