ZME SCIENCE - Whether you’re a human or a mouse, staying physically active is good for you. But one of the central ideas in evolutionary biology is that everything comes with trade-offs. If you dedicate too much energy to becoming stronger or faster, that’s energy that can’t be spent on repairing the body or living...
STUDY FINDS - For decades, scientists have assumed that being highly active comes at a price. Push a body harder, burn more energy, and something else must suffer, whether that’s the immune system, reproduction, or lifespan. It’s a tidy idea rooted in basic biology: resources are finite, so spending more on one thing means spending...
BIG BIOLOGY PODCAST - What are eco‑evolutionary dynamics and how can we study them in the wild? Why do some fish evolve placentas? In this episode, we talk with David Reznick , Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of California, Riverside. David has spent much of his career studying Trinidadian guppies to understand adaptation...
STUDY FINDS - Common sense tells us that when the body is dehydrated, physical performance declines. Athletes and coaches have long known that even modest fluid loss can hurt endurance and speed. However, research focusing on laboratory mice has uncovered a puzzling exception. The fittest animals actually ran more, not less, when deprived of water...
FRONTIERS - The British evolutionary biologist JBS Haldane is said to have quipped that any divine being evidently had ‘an ordinate fondness for beetles’. This bon mot conveyed an important truth: the ‘tree of life’ – the family tree of all species, living or extinct – is very uneven. In places, it resembles a dense...
Ellie Armstrong is a scientist by training, a dog photographer by hobby, and a rescuer by nature. By day, she is an evolutionary biologist at UC Riverside building genomic tools to trace the ancestry of species facing extinction. In her free time, she takes glamour shots of foster dogs to help them get adopted. Both...
The UC Riverside departments of Evolution, Ecology & Organismal Biology, Botany and Plant Sciences, and Environmental Sciences hosted the inaugural Southern California Conference on Ecological Change on February 14. The inaugural event was organized in response to the effects of warming climate, larger and more frequent fires, urbanization and land development, and invasive species on...
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE - Megalodons might have been longer and thinner than previously thought, according to a new study. The enormous, extinct sharks, scientists now say, grew to between 54 and 80 feet long and weighed about 94 tons. Earlier estimates had them at a maximum of 50 feet. Based on the massive size of the...
ZME SCIENCE - If Meg 3 ever happens, the filmmakers might need to ditch the oversized great white shark trope. A new study published in Palaeontologia Electronica found that the famous megalodon wasn’t just an outsized version of today’s great white shark. Researchers now say this ancient super-predator was a longer, more streamlined animal built...
METRO UK - Experts have said the prehistoric predator the Megalodon was a ‘sleeker’ creature than the one portrayed in the 2018 movie, where a beast akin to a great white shark wrought havoc in the ocean. Using an innovative study approach, a team of scientists sought to better understand the biology of the animal...
