Berkeley, California - Two thousand California honey bees may have a story to tell. So too, more than 10,000 deer mice, and 3,000 oaks. Specimens of these plants and animals populate massive collections in Berkeley’s renowned research museums, and are now being enlisted as guides to past episodes of habitat and climate change.
“Our goal was to diagnose which species are vulnerable in the modern world, using the past as a guide,” said lead author Seth Finnegan, an assistant professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “We believe the past can inform the way we plan our conservation efforts. However, there is a lot more work that needs to be done to understand the causes underlying these patterns and their policy implications.”
Research by Professor Robert Dudley and postdoc Victor Ortega is featured in a segment on KQED Science about Hummingbirds in a wind tunnel.
Lindsey Dougherty’s love of the sea eventually led her to UC Berkeley, where she is now a graduate student focusing on one of the ocean’s more unusual critters: a clam that flashes in the deep.
This behavior earned it the nickname ‘disco clam,’ and Dougherty is working with UC Berkeley’s Roy Caldwell, professor of integrative biology, to explore how and why it flashes its mirrored lips.
Professor Montgomery Slatkin has been selected by the Academic Senate to be one of two lecturers for the 2015 Martin Meyerson Faculty Research Lectures. The lecture, titled “Population Genetics of the Neanderthal Genome Project" will take place on Wednesday April 1.
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The whirling, winged seeds of today's conifers are an engineering wonder and, as University of California, Berkeley, scientists show, a result of about 270 million years of evolution by trees experimenting with the best way to disperse their seeds.
Anthony D. Barnosky is a Professor in the Department of Integrative Biology, Curator in the Museum of Paleontology, and Research Paleoecologist in the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University of California, Berkeley.
Climbing trees is every kid's right of passage, but climbing a 200-foot coastal redwood tree is something else altogether. Yet that's exactly what master tree climbing instructor Tim Kovar and redwood biologist Cameron Williams with the Department of Integrative Biology at UC-Berkeley, will be doing in late March.
Imagine eating at your favorite restaurant and being told that the salad on your plate was harvested from the cracks in the sidewalk in West Oakland. Would you eat it? Two professors from UC Berkeley think you should. Their project is called Berkeley Open Source Food.