A male platypus has a paddle-shaped tail, flat bill, sleek furry body and half-inch spurs connected to a venom-secreting gland on each hind leg. They are among the few venomous mammals.
That’s one of the many animal facts visitors may learn when they visit the UC Davis Museum of Wildlife and Fish Biology (MWFB), which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year.
UC Davis polar ecologist Eric Post has kept a close eye on Arctic Greenland for nearly 30 years, documenting changes to the warming landscape and the plants and animals who call it home.
In the classroom environment, he’s seen climate change create a different shift among students — one in which climate anxiety is an unavoidable and increasingly frequent reality.
The idea of food chains and food webs in the animal kingdom is simple: Remove a link or thread, and the system is broken. But nature is complex, and it’s not always clear how the absence of one species may impact others.
Other times, the connection is devastatingly clear.
When pay-to-conserve programs don’t come through with payments, they don’t conserve, indicates a case study by the University of California, Davis, of a REDD+ Readiness program on the island of Pemba, off the coast of Tanzania.
A supportive environment can bring out the best in an individual — even for a bird.
After an E.coli outbreak in 2006 devastated the spinach industry, farmers were pressured to remove natural habitat to keep wildlife — and the foodborne pathogens they can sometimes carry — from visiting crops. A study published today from the University of California, Davis, shows that farms with surrounding natural habitat experience the most benefits from birds, including less crop damage and lower food-safety risks.
About the size of a small school bus, the basking shark is the second largest fish in the ocean and is found in temperate and tropical waters across the globe. In the mid-1900s, basking sharks were observed by the thousands each year off California’s coast. Now they are rarely seen at all in this region, called the California Current Ecosystem, or CCE.
Concerns over foodborne risk from birds may not be as severe as once thought by produce farmers, according to research from the University of California, Davis, that found low instances of E. coli and Salmonellaprevalence.
Humans acknowledge that personality goes a long way, at least for our species. But scientists have been more hesitant to ascribe personality — defined as consistent behavior over time — to other animals.
Implications for Carbon Exchange in a Warming, Drying Tundra
15-year experiment on Arctic shrubs in Greenland lends new understanding to an enduring ecological puzzle: How do species with similar needs and life histories occur together at large scales while excluding each other at small scales? The answer to this question has important implications for how climate change might shift species’ distributions across the globe.
Conserving Rainforests Safeguards Cultural Connections Between People and Birds
Deforestation and a drying climate threaten the bird species that people value most, according to a recent study led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the University of British Columbia.