RSS Feed
Author Archive
Battle for Survival May Yield the Rain Forest’s Diversity
Posted by New York Times: Carl Zimmer on January 2nd, 2014
New York Times: The diversity of a tropical rain forest can be hard to fathom for people who have not seen one. Three acres of jungle may be home to more than 650 species of trees — more species than grow in the entire continental United States and Canada combined. It’s tempting to look at all those species living so close together as a picture of peaceful coexistence. But Phyllis D. Coley and Thomas A. Kursar, a husband-and-wife team of ecologists at the University of Utah, see them as war zones. Hordes of insects...
Posted in 
Panorama of Species Tweaks Life for Climate
Posted by New York Times: Carl Zimmer on April 4th, 2011
New York Times: Over the past 540 million years, life on Earth has passed through five great mass extinctions. In each of those catastrophes, an estimated 75 percent or more of all species disappeared in a few million years or less. For decades, scientists have warned that humans may be ushering in a sixth mass extinction, and recently a group of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, tested the hypothesis. They applied new statistical methods to a new generation of fossil databases. As they reported...