{"id":5096,"date":"2011-04-27T15:46:35","date_gmt":"2011-04-27T19:46:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/?p=5096"},"modified":"2011-04-27T15:46:35","modified_gmt":"2011-04-27T19:46:35","slug":"buffo-the-truffle-hunting-dog-night-blooming-balsa-trees-and-fire-ant-made-rafts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/2011\/04\/27\/buffo-the-truffle-hunting-dog-night-blooming-balsa-trees-and-fire-ant-made-rafts\/","title":{"rendered":"Buffo the truffle-hunting dog, night-blooming balsa trees and fire-ant-made rafts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Truffle shuffle: <\/strong>According to a letter<\/a> published in the April issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment<\/em>, Buffo the truffle-hunting dog made an unusual find: a one-pound Burgundy truffle in the forests of southern Germany in November. As lead author Ulf B\u00fcntgen said in a recent Wired Science<\/em> article, \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a small find, but a big and expensive truffle with lots of smaller ones around. It was strange to find it in an area where, so far, this truffle\u2019s existence has never been reported\u2026The season, early November, was also unusual. This led us to ask, \u2018what is driving truffle growth here? Is it connected to climate?\u2019\u201d Read more<\/a> at \u201cTruffle-Hunting Dog Finds Jackpot in Unexpected Place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blooming balsa:<\/strong> Large, blooming balsa trees attract wildlife in the night with their nectar-laden blossoms. Natalie Angier elaborated in a National Geographic<\/em> article: \u201cWhen [the capuchin monkeys] look up again, their muzzles are speckled with pollen, which from the [balsa] tree\u2019s perspective is the whole point of its flowers: to capture the attention of a pollinator long enough that the animal can\u2019t help but be brushed with the plant\u2019s equivalent of semen, which, if all goes well, the inadvertent matchmaker will eventually deliver to the female parts of another balsa tree\u2019s flowers. The exchange is simple: You get drinks on the house, my gametes get a ride on your face.\u201d Read more<\/a> at \u201cPanama\u2019s Ochroma Trees.\u201d<\/p>\n

Deepwater update:<\/strong> One year after the Deepwater Horizon explosion sent oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico, scientists are still researching the longterm ecological impact of an incident that is unique in many ways. That is, \u201c[t]he field of coral was just 11 kilometres from the Deepwater Horizon well head, which earlier in the year had spewed out more than 4 million barrels of oil and a similar amount of methane\u2014the largest ever accidental release in the ocean,\u201d wrote Mark Schrope in a Nature<\/em> article. \u201cThe spill was unique in other ways, too. Located beyond the continental shelf and some 1,400 metres below the surface, it happened in deeper water than any other major spill in history.\u201d Read more<\/a> at \u201cOil spill: Deep wounds.\u201d<\/p>\n

Peacock spots:<\/strong> Mate selection in peacocks may be more complex than previously thought. That is, the number of eyespots on a male peacock\u2019s feathers is likely not the only factor responsible for female\u2019s mate selection.\u201cThe threshold idea certainly makes sense at first glance, says Adeline Loyau, a peacock researcher at the CNRS research station in Moulis, France,\u201d in a Science News<\/em> article by Susan Milius. \u201cThe struggle to understand the long-familiar peacock, adds [Loyau], \u2018suggests that we are still far from unraveling the mechanisms of mate choice.\u2019\u201d Read more<\/a> at \u201cThe eyespots have it after all.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fire ant raft:<\/strong> The fire ant (Solenopsis invicta<\/em>) copes with heavy rain in Argentina by linking together and forming a living raft of ants (see below video). Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science<\/em> explains the research by Nathan Mlot from the Georgia Institute of Technology which explores this survival technique: \u201cBy trapping bubbles around and between their bodies, the ants also ensure that they can breathe and float. The bubbles slash the density of their self-made raft by a whopping 75%. An individual ant may be denser than water, but a raft <\/em>of ants is far less<\/em> dense. That\u2019s why it floats. Even if Mlot pushed the raft down with a stick, it still refused to sink. The ants \u2018dented\u2019 the water, but they wouldn\u2019t go under it.\u201d Read more<\/a> at \u201cFire ants assemble into living waterproof rafts.\u201d<\/p>\n

Also, queen bee<\/a> protein, Chernobyl\u2019s wildlife<\/a>, the price<\/a> of an endangered bird, drought and fires<\/a> in Texas, orchids fake<\/a> infection, interview on an essay<\/a> discussing the climate debate<\/a>, Betula nana<\/em> in Arctic tundra<\/a> and Colombia\u2019s ecosystems<\/a> threatened by gold and coal rushes.<\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Mauricio Mercadante<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Truffle shuffle: According to a letter published in the April issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Buffo the truffle-hunting dog made an unusual find: a one-pound Burgundy truffle in the forests of southern Germany in November. As lead author Ulf B\u00fcntgen said in a recent Wired Science article, \u201cThis wasn\u2019t a small find, but a big and expensive…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[311,966,991,52,199,1026,1116,142,747,1066,825,55,893,726,140,74],"class_list":["post-5096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-research","tag-ants","tag-chernobyl","tag-climate-2","tag-deepwater-horizon","tag-ecosystems","tag-endangered","tag-female","tag-fire-ants","tag-flowers","tag-forest","tag-germany","tag-gulf-of-mexico","tag-monkeys","tag-oil-spill","tag-trees","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/esa.org\/esablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}