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Categories: Ecology: Endangered Species, Mathematics: Modeling

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A new machine-learning technique can efficiently learn to control a robot, leading to better performance with fewer data.

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What happens inside the carnivorous plant Venus Flytrap when it catches an insect? New technology has led to discoveries about the electrical signalling that causes the trap to snap shut. Bioelectronic technology enables advanced research into how plants react to their surroundings, and to stress.

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When oleander aphids infested tropical milkweed, monarch butterflies laid fewer eggs on the plant, and the caterpillars developing on those plants were slower to mature.

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All plants and lichens listed as endangered under the Endangered Species Act are sensitive to climate change but there are few plans in place to address this threat directly, according to new research.

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Some of the world's most distinct and ancient animal species, which play crucial roles in our planet's ecosystems, are exploited for the wildlife trade across large parts of the world, according to new research.

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Performing a genetic evaluation on the largest captive-bred population of the critically endangered Orinoco crocodile, researchers have revealed that the population preserves much of its founder diversity and no inbreeding, making it suitable for implementing wild releases. Since this species is almost extinct in the wild, the news brings hope for the recovery of populations.

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Arctic terns -- which fly on the longest migrations of any animal on Earth -- may be able to navigate the dangers posed by climate change, new research suggests.

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Researchers have identified a genetic sequence that is essential for plant reproduction. As this region is found in all plant species, it is expected to contribute to future crossbreeding initiatives and help solve the important problem of seed formation defects.

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In a multi-generation experiment, researchers found microbes helped plants cope with drought, but not in response to plants' cries for help. Instead, the environment itself selected for drought-tolerant microbes. And while those hardy microbes were doing their thing, they just happened to make plants more drought-tolerant, too.

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Deep in the tropical Andes, a genus called Nasa harbored elusive and forgotten plant species. Through the collaborative efforts of botanists and citizen scientists on iNaturalist, these plants have been rediscovered after decades, some even after more than a century.

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Newly identified plant fossils found in Argentina suggest that a group of spurges long thought to have Asian origins may have first appeared in Gondwanan South America.

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Enzymes play a key role in cellular metabolic processes. To enable the quantitative assessment of these processes, researchers need to know the so-called 'turnover number' (for short: kcat) of the enzymes. A team of bioinformaticians now describes a tool for predicting this parameter for various enzymes using AI methods.

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Scientists have found that competition between strains of beneficial bacteria in the soil degrades the service that the bacteria provide to their hosts.

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Climate change is affecting the types of plant varieties we can cultivate, as well as how and where we can do so. A new collection of articles in the open access journal PLOS Biology explores the twin challenges of engineering plants for resilience to climate change and enhancing their carbon-capture potential.

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Approximately 99.9% of fish and shark species are 'cold-blooded', meaning their body tissues generally match the temperature of the water they swim in -- but researchers have just discovered the mighty basking shark is a one-in-a-thousand exception. Instead, these sharks keep the core regions of their bodies warmer than the water like the most athletic swimmers in the sea such as great white sharks, mako sharks and tuna.

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For approximately 3,000 years, generations of green sea turtles have returned to the same seagrass meadows to eat. The fact that this stretches over many generations highlights the importance of protecting seagrass meadows along the coasts of North Africa.

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In a new study, researchers have found that the restoration efforts of the critically endangered species elkhorn coral depend largely on the animal's location, microbiome, and the right conditions to provide an abundance of food.

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Oceanic islands provide useful models for ecology, biogeography and evolutionary research. Many ground-breaking findings -- including Darwin's theory of evolution -- have emerged from the study of species on islands and their interplay with their living and non-living environment. Now, an international research team has investigated the flora of the Canary Island of Tenerife. The results were surprising: the island's plant-life exhibits a remarkable diversity of forms. But the plants differ little from mainland plants in functional terms. However, unlike the flora of the mainland, the flora of Tenerife is dominated by slow-growing, woody shrubs with a 'low-risk' life strategy.

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Plant diversity in nature is generally highest in tropical regions around the equator, with decreasing diversity closer to the poles. Researchers now show that the plant specimens housed in herbaria in Europe and North America are more comprehensive and diverse than the collections housed in the countries with more natural plant diversity.

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Many landscapes in the tropics consist of a mosaic of different types of land use. How people make use of these different ecosystems, with their particular plant communities, was unclear until now. Researchers, many of them from Madagascar, have now investigated this. When considering biodiversity, forests often get the most attention. But this research shows that rural households use a wide range of plant species and services provided by many nearby ecosystem types.