In dark alleys of the Pacific and Indian oceans, new research shows some of the deadliest, armored fishes on the planet are packing switchblades in their faces.

“Everyone who has gone fishing has wondered why fish jump,” says John Reynolds, SFU professor of marine ecology.

A recently published study by scientists from the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and Oregon State University has confirmed that efforts to protect migrating pronghorn by installing wildlife crossing structures over highways have succeeded, in terms of the increased success rate of pronghorn crossings over time.

Every summer, thousands of amateur scallopers flock to the warm coastal waters of Florida’s Crystal River region, anchor their boats and reap the delicious bounty of the state’s largest recreational bay scallop fishery.

With the recent discovery of a rabid bat in Jasper National Park, it’s natural to wonder, 'Do I need to worry?'

This summer, as wild bison are reintroduced to Banff National Park for the first time in over a century, geographers from the University of Calgary have been surveying the move intently.

University of Manitoba researchers have published new findings that can help us save grassland birds, whose populations have declined more severely than species of any other Canadian ecosystem.

As marine mammals evolved to make water their primary habitat, they lost the ability to make a protein that defends humans and other land-dwelling mammals from the neurotoxic effects of a popular man-made pesticide, according to new research from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.

The implications of this discovery, announced today in Science, led researchers to call for monitoring our waterways to learn more about the impact of pesticides and agricultural run-off on marine mammals, such as dolphins, manatees, seals and whales. The research also may shed further light on the function of the gene encoding this protein in humans.

“We need to determine if marine mammals are, indeed, at an elevated risk of serious neurological damage from these pesticides because they biologically lack the ability to break them down, or if they’ve somehow adapted to avoid such damage in an as-yet undiscovered way,” said senior author Nathan L. Clark, Ph.D., associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Computational and Systems Biology, and the Pittsburgh Center for Evolutionary Biology and Medicine. “Either way, this is the kind of serendipitous finding that results from curiosity-driven scientific research. It is helping us to understand what our genes are doing and the impact the environment can have on them.”

Continue reading at UPMC

Image via R. Bonde, USGS

Why does the egg size of house sparrows vary so much? Isn’t it always an advantage to be big?

Perhaps not surprisingly, baby sparrows that hatch from large eggs are consistently bigger their small egg counterparts. They can store up more reserves if food becomes scarce. So you would think that it’s always a good idea to lay big eggs because your offspring would seem to have a greater chance of survival.

A study by Simon Fraser University resource and environmental management researcher Jenn Burt reveals that sunflower sea stars play a critical role in the resilience of B.C.'s kelp forests, which are among the most productive ecosystems on Earth.