News Release
3-Jul-2024
Artificial light is a deadly siren song for young fish
Reports and Proceedings
Society for Experimental Biology
image: Light pollution at night over aquatic habitats in French Polynesia.
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Credit: Jules Schligler
New research finds that artificial light at night (ALAN) attracts larval fish away from naturally lit habitats, while dramatically lowering their chances of survival in an “ecological trap”, with serious consequences for fish conservation and fishing stock management.
Many contemporary studies have used methods designed to study dogs—a poor proxy, as our furry friends have fewer facial expressions than their ancestors.
(These techniques have previously been used to study facial expressions in cats.)
These expressions were common to all of the gray, arctic, and Canadian wolf packs the researchers observed.
In experiments, they observed that the ants treated their nest members' femur injuries by cleaning the wound with their mouths before amputating the leg by repeatedly biting it, while the tibia wounds were treated with just cleaning.
I wonder how the ant functions after this. It mentions that later the survival rate goes up but is the ant still able to do everything it used to? Like how ants can carry a lot more than their body weight, does that change for the ant after it got amputated?
The scientists are now extending their research to other ant species that don't possess special antimicrobial glands to see if other ants have the ability to perform surgeries.
The study found that in animals, a high-fat diet disrupts resident gut bacteria, alters behavior and, through a complex pathway connecting the gut to the brain, influences brain chemicals in ways that fuel anxiety.
"To think that just a high-fat diet could alter expression of these genes in the brain is extraordinary," said Lowry. "The high-fat group essentially had the molecular signature of a high anxiety state in their brain."
For example, researchers studying vitiligo, an autoimmune skin disorder, can directly assess how a potential intervention impacts autoimmune processes in skin tissue derived from people with vitiligo.