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New Fish Data Reveal How Evolutionary Bursts Create Species
In three bursts of adaptive change, one species of cichlid fish in Lake Tanganyika gave rise to hundreds.
A Physicist’s Approach to Biology Brings Ecological Insights
The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.
Out-of-Sync ‘Loners’ May Secretly Protect Orderly Swarms
Studies of collective behavior usually focus on how crowds of organisms coordinate their actions. But what if the individuals that don’t participate have just as much to tell us?
Some Animals Have No Microbiome. Here’s What That Tells Us.
To stay healthy, humans and some other animals rely on a complex community of bacteria in their guts. But research is starting to show that those partnerships might be more the exception than the rule.
Nature Versus Nurture? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate.
We give our genes and our environment all the credit for making us who we are. But random noise during development might be just as important.
Biodiversity May Thrive Through Games of Rock-Paper-Scissors
Recent findings add weight to the evidence that the intransitive competitions between species enrich the diversity of nature.
Biodiversity Alters Strategies of Bacterial Evolution
In evolution, context is everything: Bacteria with neighbors evolve to rebuff viruses in a different way.
New Hybrid Species Remix Old Genes Creatively
Clues from fish diversity suggest that interbreeding between species could be a major mechanism of fast speciation.
What’s in a Name? Taxonomy Problems Vex Biologists
Researchers struggle to incorporate ongoing evolutionary discoveries into an animal classification scheme older than Darwin.