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Climate change has severe consequences for egg-laying and migration in birds

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Written by Thomas Hesselberg
Monday, 14 January 2008
Climate change affects the timing of migration and egg-laying in birds. Photo courtesy of photocase.com. Last year most people, including politicians, finally realised that climate change in the form of global warming is affecting our planet. However, it does not only affect us humans in the form of increased dramatic weather and lower crop yields due to draught or flooding. Climate change is likewise affecting plants and animals. Birds for instance use temperature as a cue for many life cycle decisions. Now an international research group headed by the Swedish ornithologist Anders Hedenström from the University of Lund has used computer model to show the effects of climate change on egg-laying and timing of migration in birds. Tag it: ? Be first to comment this article \| Add as favourites (26) \| Quote this article on your site \| Views: 1292 \| E-mail
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Poisonous spiders gaining ground in Europe

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Written by Dr. H. P. Bustami
Sunday, 18 November 2007
Scytodes thoracica (5 mm) a tropical specie now living in houses all over Europe. (P: Jørgen Lissner) Since ancient times mans trade activity gave rise for migrating species from continent to continent. Nowadays combined with climate change new spider species are arriving in Europe. Every other year taxonomists find a new spider from other continents. Main source for that distribution is the global trade. The invasive spiders in average exceed european spiders in size and live within in buildings. Thus with more and more poisonous spiders the danger for humans rises with each year. In the last 150 years some 87 new spider species have been discribed due to a study of the Zoological Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland. These results of Wolfgang Nentwig and Manuel Kobelt recently were published in "Diversity and Distribution". Tag it: ? Be first to comment this article \| Add as favourites (20) \| Quote this article on your site \| Views: 1168 \| E-mail
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Can rain reduce the risk of malaria?

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Written by Thomas Hesselberg
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Rain might reduce the risk of malaria, since the mosquito larvae suffers higher mortality during rainfall. Photo courtesy of photocase.com. Intuitively, we certainly would not expect rainfall to have any positive influence on the number of malaria cases, on the contrary. Malaria, one of the world’s most damaging diseases with more than 300 million cases per year and more than a million deaths, is transmitted by mosquitoes in the genus Anopheles. Since the mosquito larvae live in small ponds, it would be expected that the more rain the more water-filled ponds and crevices, the more mosquitoes and malaria. However, findings reported by the scientists from the Unversity of Wageningen in the Netherlands and Kenya Medical Research Institute suggest that increased rainfall will have a negative effect on mosquito larval populations and thus potentially on Malaria. Tag it: ? Be first to comment this article \| Add as favourites (17) \| Quote this article on your site \| Views: 415 \| E-mail
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Self-organisation among bacteria

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Written by Thomas Hesselberg
Wednesday, 31 October 2007
The organisation of bacteria in colonies is studied intensively. In the past decades, researchers have been working hard on solving the problem of how individual cells in a multicellular organism organise themselves in structures such as hearts, brains, lungs etc during ontogeny. Although far from fully understood, a picture is slowly emerging of a complex set of control interactions between the genetic commands of the DNA within the cell and protein and RNA information within and among the cells. However, intriguingly it has been known for some time that simple prokaryotic bacteria are capable of self-organising and cooperating into superstructures to form biofilm and those involved in infectious diseases. Scientists from America and Sweden have now investigated this process in detail. Tag it: ? Be first to comment this article \| Add as favourites (14) \| Quote this article on your site \| Views: 329 \| E-mail
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Greenhouse effect causes better plant growth but reduces protein content of food plants

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Written by Dr. H. P. Bustami
Sunday, 16 September 2007
Climate change effects on plant growth. Within the rings the carbon dioxide content was 550 ppm (Courtesy of Institute of agricultural sciences, Braunschweig, Germany) The majority of scientists care more about the negative impact of the predicted increase of CO2 in the athmosphere. But some people like Hans Joachim Weigel from the Institute of agricultural ecology (federal science center for agricultural science, Germany) investigate the impact of an enhanced carbon dioxide content in the air on green plants. How far will the crops increase with increasing green house effect? This question Weigel and his team adressed in open field experiments for more than six years. The results have now been published in "Nature". Tag it: ? Be first to comment this article \| Add as favourites (23) \| Quote this article on your site \| Views: 1134 \| E-mail
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Homo sapiens uses up one quarter of earth primary biomass production