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Ecological Naïvete
Island tameness is the tendency of many populations and species of animals living on isolated islands to lose their wariness of potential predators, particularly of large animals. The term is partly synonymous with ecological naïveté, which also has a wider meaning referring to the loss of defensive behaviors and adaptations needed to deal with these "new" predators. Species retain such wariness of predators that exist in their environment; for example, a Hawaiian goose retains its wariness of hawks (due to its main predator being the Hawaiian hawk), but does not exhibit such behaviors with mammals or other predators not found on the Hawaiian Islands. The most famous example is the dodo, which owed its extinction in large part to a lack of fear of humans, and many species of penguin (which, although wary of sea predators, have no real land predators and therefore are very bold and curious towards humans). A comparison of 66 species of lizards found that flight initiation distanc ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nene Sign
Nene may refer to: People * Nene (name), list of people with this name * Kōdai-in, formerly known as Nene (1546–1624), principal samurai wife of Toyotomi Hideyoshi * Nené (footballer, born 1942) (1942–2016), nickname of Brazilian footballer Claudio Olinto de Carvalho * Nenê (footballer, born 1944) (1944–2014), nickname of Brazilian footballer Érico de Paula Coelho Filho * Nené (footballer, born 1949) Tamagnini Manuel Gomes Batista (born 20 November 1949), known as Nené (), is a retired Portuguese professional footballer. A prolific striker, he played his entire career with Benfica, appearing in nearly 600 official games for the club and ..., nickname of Portuguese footballer Tamagnini Manuel Gomes Baptista * Nenê (footballer, born 1981), nickname of Brazilian footballer Anderson Luiz de Carvalho * Nenê (footballer, born 1983), nickname of Brazilian footballer Ânderson Miguel da Silva * Nené (footballer, born 1995), Rui Filipe Cunha Correia * Nené (fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ecology
Ecology () is the natural science of the relationships among living organisms and their Natural environment, environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community (ecology), community, ecosystem, and biosphere levels. Ecology overlaps with the closely related sciences of biogeography, evolutionary biology, genetics, ethology, and natural history. Ecology is a branch of biology, and is the study of abundance (ecology), abundance, biomass (ecology), biomass, and distribution of organisms in the context of the environment. It encompasses life processes, interactions, and adaptations; movement of materials and energy through living communities; ecological succession, successional development of ecosystems; cooperation, competition, and predation within and between species; and patterns of biodiversity and its effect on ecosystem processes. Ecology has practical applications in fields such as conservation biology, wetland management, natural resource m ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Insular Dwarfism
Insular dwarfism, a form of phyletic dwarfism, is the process and condition of large animals evolving or having a reduced body size when their population's range is limited to a small environment, primarily islands. This natural process is distinct from the intentional creation of dwarf breeds, called dwarfing. This process has occurred many times throughout evolutionary history, with examples including various species of Dwarf elephant, dwarf elephants that evolved during the Pleistocene epoch, as well as more ancient examples, such as the dinosaurs ''Europasaurus'' and ''Magyarosaurus''. This process, and other "island genetics" artifacts, can occur not only on islands, but also in other situations where an ecosystem is isolated from external resources and breeding. This can include caves, desert oases, isolated valleys and isolated mountains ("sky islands"). Insular dwarfism is one aspect of the more general Foster's rule, "island effect" or "Foster's rule", which posits that w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Evolutionary Physiology
Evolutionary physiology is the study of the biological evolution of physiological structures and processes; that is, the manner in which the functional characteristics of organisms have responded to natural selection or sexual selection or changed by random genetic drift across multiple generations during the history of a population or species. It is a sub-discipline of both physiology and evolutionary biology. Practitioners in the field come from a variety of backgrounds, including physiology, evolutionary biology, ecology, and genetics. Accordingly, the range of phenotypes studied by evolutionary physiologists is broad, including life history traits, behavior, whole-organism performance, functional morphology, biomechanics, anatomy, classical physiology, endocrinology, biochemistry, and molecular evolution. The field is closely related to comparative physiology, ecophysiology, and environmental physiology, and its findings are a major concern of evolutionary medicine. One def ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Behavioral Ecology
Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for ethology, animal behavior due to ecology, ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined Tinbergen's four questions, four questions to address when studying animal behaviors: what are the proximate causes, ontogeny, Adaption, survival value, and phylogeny of a behavior? If an organism has a trait that provides a selective advantage (i.e., has adaptive significance) in its environment, then natural selection favors it. Adaptive significance refers to the expression of a trait that affects fitness, measured by an individual's reproductive success. Adaptive traits are those that produce more copies of the individual's genes in future generations. Maladaptive traits are those that leave fewer. For example, if a bird that can call more loudly attracts more mates, then a loud call is an adaptive trait for that species because a louder bird mates ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Plant
Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they are predominantly Photosynthesis, photosynthetic. This means that they obtain their energy from sunlight, using chloroplasts derived from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria to produce sugars from carbon dioxide and water, using the green pigment chlorophyll. Exceptions are parasitic plants that have lost the genes for chlorophyll and photosynthesis, and obtain their energy from other plants or fungi. Most plants are multicellular organism, multicellular, except for some green algae. Historically, as in Aristotle's biology, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi. Definitions have narrowed since then; current definitions exclude fungi and some of the algae. By the definition used in this article, plants form the clade Viridiplantae (green plants), which consists of the green algae and the embryophytes or land plants (hornworts, liverworts ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Zealand
New Zealand () is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and List of islands of New Zealand, over 600 smaller islands. It is the List of island countries, sixth-largest island country by area and lies east of Australia across the Tasman Sea and south of the islands of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga. The Geography of New Zealand, country's varied topography and sharp mountain peaks, including the Southern Alps (), owe much to tectonic uplift and volcanic eruptions. Capital of New Zealand, New Zealand's capital city is Wellington, and its most populous city is Auckland. The islands of New Zealand were the last large habitable land to be settled by humans. Between about 1280 and 1350, Polynesians began to settle in the islands and subsequently developed a distinctive Māori culture. In 1642, the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman became the first European to sight and record New Zealand. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Island Restoration
The ecological restoration of islands, or island restoration, is the application of the principles of ecological restoration to islands and island groups. Islands, due to their isolation, are home to many of the world's endemic (ecology), endemic species, as well as important breeding grounds for seabirds and some marine mammals. Their ecosystems are also very vulnerable to human disturbance (ecology), disturbance and particularly to introduced species, due to their small size. Island groups, such as New Zealand and Hawaii, have undergone substantial extinctions and losses of Habitat (ecology), habitat. Since the 1950s several organisations and government agencies around the world have worked to restore islands to their original states; New Zealand has used them to hold natural populations of species that would otherwise be unable to survive in the wild. The principal components of island restoration are the removal of introduced species and the reintroduction of native species. I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Conservation Biology
Conservation biology is the study of the conservation of nature and of Earth's biodiversity with the aim of protecting species, their habitats, and ecosystems from excessive rates of extinction and the erosion of biotic interactions. It is an interdisciplinary subject drawing on natural and social sciences, and the practice of natural resource management. The nature conservation, conservation ethic is based on the findings of conservation biology. Origins The term conservation biology and its conception as a new field originated with the convening of "The First International Conference on Research in Conservation Biology" held at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, California, in 1978 led by American biologists Bruce A. Wilcox and Michael E. Soulé with a group of leading university and zoo researchers and conservationists including Kurt Benirschke, Sir Otto Frankel, Thomas Lovejoy, and Jared Diamond. The meeting was prompted due to concern over tropical de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Key Deer
The Key deer (''Odocoileus virginianus clavium'') is an endangered subspecies of the white-tailed deer that lives only in the Florida Keys. It is the smallest extant North American deer species. Description This deer can be recognized by its characteristic size, smaller than all other white-tailed deer. Adult males (known as bucks) usually weigh and stand about tall at the shoulder. Adult females (does) usually weigh between and have an average height of at the shoulders. The deer is a reddish-brown to grey-brown in color. Antlers are grown by males and shed between February and March and regrown by June. When the antlers are growing, they have a white velvet coating. The subspecies otherwise generally resembles other white-tailed deer in appearance. Behavior Key deer easily swim between islands. Living close to humans, they have little of the natural fear of humans shown by most of their larger mainland relatives (an example of island tameness). The deer are often found in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lyall's Wren
Lyall's wren or the Stephens Island wren (''Traversia lyalli'') was a small, flightless passerine belonging to the family Acanthisittidae, the New Zealand wrens. Now extinct, it was once found throughout New Zealand, but when it came to the attention of scientists in 1894, its last refuge was Stephens Island in Cook Strait. Often claimed to be a species driven extinct by a single creature (a lighthouse keeper's cat named Tibbles), the wren in fact fell victim to the island's numerous feral cats. The wren was described almost simultaneously by both Walter Rothschild and Walter Buller. It became extinct shortly thereafter. Taxonomy The bird's scientific name commemorates the assistant lighthouse keeper, David Lyall, who first brought the bird to the attention of science. It was described as a distinct genus, ''Traversia'', in honour of naturalist and curio dealer Henry H. Travers, who procured many specimens from Lyall. ''Traversia'' is a member of the family Acanthisittidae ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laysan Rail
The Laysan rail or Laysan crake (''Zapornia palmeri'') was a flightless bird endemic to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, Northwest Hawaiian Island of Laysan. This small island was and still is an important seabird colony, and sustained a number of Endemism, endemic species, including the rail. It became extinct due to habitat loss by domestic rabbits, and ultimately World War II. Taxonomy Its scientific name honours Henry Palmer, who collected in the Hawaiian Islands for Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Walter Rothschild. The following cladogram shows the placement of the Laysan rail among other rails, according to Slikas and colleagues, 2002: Description It was a small bird ( from beaktip to "tail" tip, fully stretched out), a Flightless bird, flightless member of the Rallidae, rail family. Tail and wings had been reduced in the course of its evolution to lengths of merely and , respectively, and it only had 8 remiges, primaries as opposed to 10 in volant rails ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
