News by Subject Agriculture

For more than a century, researchers have relied on flat sketches of sharks' digestive systems to discern how they function -- and how what they eat and excrete impacts other species in the ocean. Now, researchers have produced a series of high-resolution, 3D scans of intestines from nearly three dozen shark species that will advance the understanding of how sharks eat and digest their food.

New research has found marine seismic surveys used in oil and gas exploration are not impacting the abundance or behaviour of commercially valuable fishes in the tropical shelf environment in north-western Australia.

Researchers from the University of Tsukuba find that the combined effects of ocean warming and acidification in temperate marine ecosystems are resulting in a loss of kelp habitat and a shift to a simple turf-dominated ecosystem. Such changes will lead to a loss of the ecosystem services provided by productive macroalgal forests or tropicalized coral-dominated reefs. These results highlight the need for reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Researchers took 3-D printed reconstructions of fossil cephalopods to actual water tanks (including a University of Utah swimming pool) to see how their shell structure may have been tied to their movement and lifestyle.

Some sea slugs take up chloroplasts from the algae that they consume into their cells. These chloroplasts retain their ability to perform photosynthetic activity within the animal cells for several months, and thus provide them with photosynthesis-derived nutrition. A team of researchers at the National Institute for Basic Biology (NIBB), in addition to collaborators from seven other Japanese institutions, have published the genome of the sea slug, Plakobranchus ocellatus type black, in eLife.

A new early detection surveillance system for wildlife helps identify unusual patterns of illness and death in near real-time by tapping into data from wildlife rehabilitation organizations across California, explains a study from UC Davis.

The physical interactions between coral and algal cells as they join together in symbiosis have been observed for the first time. Within minutes of being introduced, the coral cells had started to engulf the algae, either digesting them or protecting them within a 'bubble' inside the cell. This new study will form the basis of further research that will expand our understanding of their symbiotic relationship, leading to improved methods of coral conservation.