"A research team involving Yale University and the University of Colorado Boulder has developed a first public demonstration version of its "Map of Life," an ambitious Web-based endeavor designed to show the distribution of all living plants and animals on the planet.
The demonstration version allows anyone with an Internet connection to map the known global distribution of almost 25,000 species of terrestrial vertebrate animals, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and North American freshwater fish. The database, which continues to expand, already contains hundreds of millions of records on the abundance and distribution of the planet's diverse flora and fauna."
Read the full article: http://colorado.edu/news/releases/2012/05/10/new-%E2%80%98map-life%E2%80%99-project-aims-show-distribution-all-plants-animals-planet
"A new species of suckermouth armored catfish has been found in Ecuador, a new study says.
DePaul University scientist Windsor Aguirre found five specimens of the odd-looking fish in 2008 in the Santa Rosa River (map) and sent them to Alabama's Auburn University for identification.
"When we first realized it was new, it wasn't particularly surprising--this family [of catfish] increases in number every year," said study leader Milton Tan, a Ph.D. student in biology at Auburn.
Instead, what interested Tan and colleagues is that the 2.8-inch-long (7-centimeter-long) species--unlike its relatives--lacks armored plates on the sides of its head."
]]>"Last seen in 1949, the 1.3-inch-long (3.2-centimeter-long) amphibian was found during a December 2011 biodiversity survey in the small central African country of Burundi, scientists announced in March.
Thwarted by decades of political conflict, few biologists have so far been able to explore Burundi's ecosystems.
"The last time this species was seen was the first time this species was seen--that's the state of our knowledge in this little corner of Africa," said team member David Blackburn, a herpetologist at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco."
]]>"When a deadly fungus infects an ant colony, the healthy insects do not necessarily ostracize their sick nest mates. Instead, they welcome the contagious with open arms--or, rather, open mouths--often licking their neighbors to remove the fungal spores before the pathogens sprout and grow. Apparently, such grooming dilutes the infection, spreading it thinly across the colony. Instead of leaving their infected peers to deal with the infection on their own and die, healthy ants share the burden, deliberately infecting everyone in the colony with a tiny dose of fungus that each individual's immune system can clear on its own. Such "social immunization" also primes the immune systems of healthy ants to battle the infection. These are the conclusions of a new study in the April 3 issue of PLoS Biology."
]]>A new species of giant, venomous wasp has been found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, scientists say.
The two-inch-long (five-centimeter-long) black insects are shrouded in mystery--all of the wasp specimens caught so far have been dead.
"I'm not certain any researcher has ever seen one alive, but they are very bizarre-looking," said study co-author Lynn Kimsey, an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, who co-discovered the insect.
"It's the extreme version of the [larrine wasp] subfamily they belong to."
]]>Though some other sea snakes have spiky scales on their bellies, "no other [known] sea snake has this curious feature," study leader Kanishka Ukuwela, an ecologist at the University of Adelaide, said by email.
Normally snakes have smooth scales, but each of the newly named Hydrophis donaldi's scales has a spiny projection, he said.
]]>What's more, for years this place had a secret. About half way up, at 225 feet above sea level, hanging on the rock surface, there is a small, spindly little bush and under that bush, a few years ago, two climbers, working in the dark, found something totally improbable hiding in the soil below. How it got there, we still don't know."
]]>The team, whose work is based in Siberia, successfully germinated a flower from an ice-age seed which is about 32,000 years old."
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