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Home > News & Events > Research News >
Archived Research News
2008
Headlines for January
Teen pregnancy among dinosaurs was the norm
Research conducted by Professor Robert Dudley shows ant parasite turns host into ripe red berry
Anna's hummingbird chirps with its tail
Headlines for February
Tracking gliding behavior in the colugo
Professor Kevin Padian reflects on Darwin's genius in Nature
Four IB students win awards at the 2008 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting
Headlines for June
Climate change could severely impact California's Endemic Plants
Ackerly Lab Shares in Two Awards for Recent Papers
Re-write the Field Guide: Birds' Evolutionary History is Revealed
Headlines for July
KQED QUEST - Tracking Raindrops airs Tuesday, 7/22 at 7:30pm
Headlines for August
Dying Frogs Sign of a Biodiversity Crisis
January
Teen pregnancy among dinosaurs was the norm
Published January 15, 2008
Research by graduate student Sarah Werning and recent IB PhD recipient Andrew Lee, show that dinosaurs reached sexual maturity near the end of a growth spurt in adolescence. The research suggests that dinosaurs suffered high adult mortality, making early sexual maturity necessary for survival.
Werning and Lee's paper has been published in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Access the abstract here.
Research conducted by Professor Robert Dudley shows ant parasite turns host into ripe red berry
Published January 17, 2008
Comparison of normal worker ants (top) and ants infected with a nematode.New research led by professor Robert Dudley reveal a new parasite that causes its host to mimic a ripe red berry. The co-authors believe this is the first example of fruit mimicry caused by a parasite.
The report, co-authored by Stephen Yanoviak at the University of Arkansas, has been accepted for publication by The American Naturalist and will be published in the spring.See the UC Berkeley News Center for more information.
Anna's hummingbird chirps with its tail
Published January 30, 2008
Research done by graduate student Christopher Clark and recent graduate Teresa Feo, show that the chirps and whistles made by the West Coast's most common hummingbird, Anna's hummingbird, are made by its tail feathers.
For more on their research, see UC Berkeley News Center.
February
Tracking gliding behavior in the colugo
Published February 11, 2008
A feeding colugo sports a backpack containing accelerometers and flash memory.Researchers tracking the Malaysian colugo, also known as the "flying" lemur, are advancing the understanding of the biomechanics and behavior of gliding animals. Led by Integrative Biology graduate student Greg Byrnes, the team attached devices which measure acceleration to the back of the colugos to study how these animals move.
The researchers' findings are published in this week's Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Read more about the research at the UC Berkeley News Center.
Professor Kevin Padian reflects on Darwin's genius in Nature
Published February 11, 2008
Integrative Biology professor Kevin Padian reflects on what constitutes Darwin's enduring greatness in this week's Nature. You can also hear Padian speaking about Darwin in the February 7 edition of the Nature podcast.
Four IB students win awards at the 2008 Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology meeting
Published February 21, 2008
Four Integrative Biology graduate students received awards and honors for their research at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology.
The students are:
- Rebecca Calisi, Best Student Poster, Division of Neurobiology
- Anne Peattie, Best Student Oral Presentation, Division of Comparative Biomechanics
- Simon Sponberg, Honorable Mention, Division of Comparative Biomechanics
- Lindsay Waldrop, Best Student Oral Presentation, Division of Invertebrate Zoology
June
Climate change could severely impact California's Endemic Plants
Published June 25, 2008
California is home to nearly 2400 species of plants that live nowhere else in the world. But climate change will dramatically alter California’s endemic plant-scape in the coming century, according to a new study by Integrative Biology professor David Ackerly and a team of collaborators.
Ackerly’s study, published on June 25 in the journal PLoS ONE, is the first regional assessment of climate change impacts on endemics in North America – and the results are sobering. Up to 30 percent of California endemic plant species could go extinct by the year 2100, according to the research team’s model, and another 40 percent could be reduced to ranges smaller than one-fifth their current size.
Beneath that bad news, however, lie important clues for conservationists trying to identify what parts of California will host the greatest diversity in the future, and therefore deserve the most intense protection efforts today.
According to the study, diversity will generally tend to move north and west. The already species-rich Pacific coast region and northern California’s Klamath mountains will continue to be important refugia, and the mountains that cup the southern end of the Central Valley also will host an increasing number of threatened species.
The foothills of the northern Sierra, on the other hand, will likely lose species as that area becomes hotter and drier.
The researchers started with plant distribution data compiled in the Jepson Manual, a comprehensive field guide to California plants. That basic information about where plants live now is the best evidence on which to base predictions about where they might live in the future.
“These are all computer simulations, and we don't have many ways to directly test the predictions,” says Ackerly, who will continue using models to explore how California’s landscape might look in the future. He says he has trouble digesting the ecological changes predicted by the study, even though he knows the extinction estimates, which ignore the effects of soil specialization and invasive plants, are likely conservative.
Ackerly is an ecologist who’s worked on problems ranging from tropical forest structure to leaf physiology. His work usually has him out in the field, observing today’s plants rather than modeling future ones. This work was done on the side, without funding. It’s a question, however, that’s too important to ignore, money and research proclivities be darned.
“It’s a bit of a jump for me,” he says. “But it’s harder and harder to be in this field and not be thinking about the effects of climate change.”by Emma Brown
The journal article can be downloaded from the PLoS ONE Web site:
http://www.plosone.org/doi/pone.0002502
IMAGES: Maps of California showing the range change of several species are available at:
http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/jepsonflora/CAFP_climate_change/index.htmlConsortium:
http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/consortium/about.html
Major media coverage:
http://ib.berkeley.edu/labs/ackerly/web/press.html
Ackerly Lab Shares in Two Awards for Recent Papers
Published June 23, 2008
Graduate student Nathan Kraft (Ackerly lab) was awarded the 2008 President's Award from the American Society of Naturalists for the Best Paper published in the American Naturalist in the previous year. Kraft's paper, entitled "Trait evolution, community assembly, and the phylogenetic structure of ecological communities", appeared in the August 2007 issue of the journal.
The Ecological Society of America selected a paper written by Cam Webb, David Ackerly, Mark McPeek and Michael Donoghue to receive this year's Cooper Prize. The paper, entitled "Phylogenetics and community ecology", was published in the Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics in 2002. The award is given annually by ESA to recognize "an outstanding contribution in geobotany, physiographic ecology, plant succession, or the distribution of organisms along environmental gradients."
Re-write the Field Guide: Birds' Evolutionary History is Revealed
Published June 30, 2008
Birders and biologists have long wondered about how the world’s 31 orders of birds and their constituent families are related to one another. Birds diversified rapidly, between 65-100 million years ago, making it very difficult to determine their evolutionary relationships. But in a new study, published July 27 in Science, researchers used multiple sections of DNA to construct the avian phylogeny, or evolutionary tree. This tree is exciting, “not just to people interested in phylogenies, but in biology as a whole,” says Berkeley Integrative Biology professor Rauri Bowie, one of the researchers on the project. “We will need to re-interpret the evolution of bird behavior and ecology.”
Songbirds, also called passerines, are the largest group of birds—over half of the world’s 9,600 species are in this order. Until now, the identity of their closest relatives has been a mystery. Says Bowie, “this has been a huge question in the literature for over 100 years.” The sister group to the songbirds has been revealed, and its the parrots. “No one had ever suggested this before,” says Bowie. In some ways, this relationship is not surprising; like many passerines, parrots are able to learn song.
Another finding? Falcons can no long fly with the eagles, or the hawks, or the rest of the raptors. Falcons are not closely related the rest of the birds of prey. But New World Vultures can take the falcons’ place in the field guide birds of prey chapter. New World Vultures were previously thought to be the closest relatives of storks, but this tree shows they belong with the raptors.
This study succeeded in determining birds’ elusive evolutionary history because the researchers based their phylogeny, or evolutionary tree, on many different genes. For each of the 169 carefully-selected species used in the study, researchers analyzed DNA taken from 19 separate loci, on multiple chromosomes. It was necessary to use DNA across the genome, an approach called phylogenomics, because birds diversified so rapidly in the past. The different groups of birds are well established (owls are distinct from parrots are distinct from flamingos), but there are no intermediate groups to provide clues about their relatedness.
The new avian phylogeny clarifies the evolutionary relationships of the bird families, creating a backbone, says Bowie. He hopes that “people will start exploring parts of the backbone in a lot more detail,” elucidating the relationships of bird species. And to reflect these relationships, says Bowie, “reorganizing field guides.”
By Jennifer Skene
UC Press:
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2008/06/30_birds.shtml
Journal Article:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/short/320/5884/1716
July
KQED QUEST - Tracking Raindrops airs Tuesday, 7/22 at 7:30pm
Published July 21, 2008
We all rely on the water cycle, but how does it really work? Scientists at UC Berkeley are embarking on a new project to understand how
global warming is effecting our fresh water supply. And they're doing it by tracking individual raindrops in Mendocino and north of Lake Tahoe.
Watch Tracking Raindrops
Tuesday, July 22 at 7:30pm on KQED 9 & amp; or
KQED HD on Comcast 709 or
online at www.kqed.org/quest.This television program focuses on the findings of the Berkeley Institute of the Environment's
Hydrowatch Center http://bie.berkeley.edu/keck, and features IB Professor Todd Dawson.
Dawson studies how redwood trees use fog water to quench their thirst.
August
Dying Frogs Sign of a Biodiversity Crisis
Published August 12, 2008
Devastating declines of amphibian species around the world are a sign of a biodiversity disaster larger than just frogs, salamanders and their ilk, according to researchers from the University of California, Berkeley.
