2020-06-24
- Brown-headed cowbirds show a bias in the sex ratio of their offspring depending on the time of the breeding season, researchers report in a new study. More female than male offspring hatch early in the breeding season in May, and more male hatchlings emerge in July.
2020-06-22 - What do Covid-19, Ebola, Lyme and AIDS have in common? They jumped to humans from animals after we started destroying habitats and ruining ecosystems.
2020-06-19 - Carla Cáceres, a professor of evolution, ecology and behavior and director of the School of Integrative Biology, ...received the Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award, which recognizes outstanding academic leadership and vision by an executive officer within a college or campus unit.
2020-06-01 - Dear SIB Community, At the end of May, 2020, Chancellor Jones sent out an email with a powerful message of unity for this campus - we must come together and care for one another. He reminds us that the University of Illinois is a "community committed to the scholarship, engagement, equity, inclusion and leadership that dismantles...
2020-03-31 - This is the story of three bird species and how they interact. The brown-headed cowbird plays the role of outlaw: It lays its eggs in other birds’ nests and lets them raise its young – often at the expense of the host’s nestlings. To combat this threat, yellow warblers have developed a special “seet” call that means, “Look out! Cowbird!” In a new study, researchers...
2020-02-07 - Researchers sequenced the genome of the orangethroat darter, pictured, and compared it with that of the rainbow darter, a closely related species. They also hybridized the two species to determine the factors that drive them to diverge.
2019-11-26 - Eight professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, to include Entomology's and EEB's Andrew Suarez, have been elected 2019 Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Suarez, a professor of entomology and head of the department of evolution, ecology and behavior, is a leading...
2019-11-14 - Cowbirds outsource parenting to other species, but an innate password tells their children to copy cowbird songs. Chicago's Sarah London, Illinois' Mark Hauber and Tokyo's Matthew Louder discovered this "password" call, that...
2019-09-30 - Many new parents are familiar with terms like “baby brain” or “mommy brain” that hint at an unavoidable decline in cognitive function associated with the hormonal changes of pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal caregiving. A new study of parental care in stickleback fish is a reminder that such parenting-induced changes in the brain and associated shifts in cognition and behavior are not just for...
2019-09-30 - Researchers at the University of Illinois have shown through a multi-year study that cowbirds (Molothrus ater) conform to Bateman’s Principle, which holds that reproductive success is greater in males than in females when they have more mates. Cowbirds are distinct from 99% of other bird species in that they are brood parasites and lay their eggs in nests of birds of other species for...
2019-07-24 - Just as humans are usually left- or right-handed, other species sometimes prefer one appendage, or eye, over the other. A new study reveals that American robins that preferentially use one eye significantly more than the other when looking at their own clutch of eggs are also more likely to detect, and reject, a foreign egg placed in their nest by another bird species – or by a devious scientist.
2019-06-27 - A Bruker 9.4 Tesla preclinical animal MRI system will be sited at the Beckman Institute. The addition of the system to the institute’s Biomedical Imaging Center will aid in research in many areas, including brain development and function, and cellular mechanisms in cancer. The installation project will begin this fall and is expected to take a year.
2019-05-01 - Mark Hauber broadens our understanding of the avian world
2019-04-17 - Like other vipers, puff adder skulls have hinged jaws that deploy the fangs when the animal opens its mouth to strike.