Search: Environmental News, Wildlife

David Gowen, an amateur botanist associated with the California Native Plant Society, has discovered two new plant species never before described by science, near downtown Walnut Creek. The discovery is startling because the area is easily accessible and it has been studied by botanists for 150 years. The plants, the Lime Ridge Navarretia (Navarretia gowenii) and the Lime Ridge Woollystar (Eriastrum sp. nov.) miraculously survived a hundred years of quarrying and other activities until their habitat was protected as the cities of Walnut Creek and Concord’s jointly owned Lime Ridge Open Space. Conservation efforts are underway.

A new study led by a UC Berkeley biologist sheds light on the factors influencing the stalled growth of the severely endangered Puerto Rican parrot, and in turn, provides an analytical tool that could help pinpoint the biggest factors hindering the recovery of other endangered species.

Using high-speed video, Integrative Biology Professor Mimi Koehl recorded live lobsters as they sniffed using their stick-like antennules bearing rows of odor-sensing hairs. Koehl is studying how structures such as hairy limbs help organisms survive in demanding environments. Gleaning design principles from living things is her stock in trade.

A new UC Berkeley-led study finds that the pathogen responsible for Sudden Oak Death, a disease that has felled millions of oaks and tanoaks along the Pacific Coast, is evolving, suggesting that movement of infected plants between different quarantined regions should be minimized. The study also revealed that the pathogen got its first toehold in California's forests outside a nursery in Santa Cruz and at Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County.

Sperm whales, dolphins and other "toothed" whales today chase squid so deep in the ocean that they have to rely on biosonar instead of their eyes to find them. Two UC Berkeley paleontologists have come up with a likely evolutionary scenario to explain how these whales developed their echolocating "biosonar" over the past 40 million years.

When a whale dies and falls to the bottom in the deep ocean, it attracts a weird community of mollusks, crabs and worms that feed on its oil-rich bones. A 15 million-year-old fossilized whale discovered on Año Nuevo Island is the first fossil whale fall discovered in California, and one of the youngest and most complete fossil whale falls ever found.

An international team of researchers led by UC Berkeley biologists has developed a remarkable new roadmap for finding and protecting the best remaining holdouts for thousands of rare species that live only in Madagascar, an island nation considered one of the world's jewels of biodiversity. The new plan not only includes lemurs – those large-eyed, tree-hopping primates that have become poster children for conservation – but also species of ants, butterflies, frogs, geckos and plants.

Researchers uncover reasons to care about California’s native bees

A ubiquitous but little-known marine organism, the choanoflagellate, is the last one-celled ancestor of humans and offers clues to how cells learned to assemble into multicelled organisms. The genome of the choanoflagellate Monisiga has now been sequenced and, according to UC Berkeley's Nicole King, offers clues to the origin of the glue that holds many-celled animals together.

Male Anna's hummingbirds can now be seen in many West Coast backyards and fields executing theirdisplay dives to seduce females and drive away intruders. UC Berkeley students have now shown that the characteristic chirp at the bottom of the male's dive, thought by many to be vocal, is produced by a split-second flaring of the tail feathers.