UMR5174 - Laboratoire Evolution et Diversite Biologique

You don’t have to get very far into an evolution textbook before you bump into Darwin’s finches, the birds descended from South American finches that colonized the Galapagos Islands and “radiated” into an array of different species, each with a beak adapted to different food sources across the archipelago. Another, equally interesting case of avian adaptation is found in North America, on a different sort of archipelago. It’s found in patches of lodgepole pine forest that cloak the slopes and foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in the hooked beaks of red crossbills.

Publié le 31 janvier 2017 dans la revue Frontiers in Marine Science, une étude menée par des chercheurs du Réseau international pour l’étude et l’échange scientifique sur les canyons sous-marins (INCISE) met en évidence l’importance écologique des canyons et la nécessité de mieux protéger ces espaces sensibles aux activités humaines. L’Ifremer a contribué à ces travaux en apportant notamment des informations sur les coraux du golfe de Gascogne.

The power to imagine a better world has helped transform human societies, and it seems it may be doing so on a smaller scale to ant societies, too.
Individual ants have now been shown to have differences in behaviour − something almost akin to having a personality − that affect colony decisions. And some ants are so different in their personal preferences that they may act as the imagination of the colony, driving it on to a better future.

Until this obstacle is overcome, the technology is unlikely to succeed in the wild.

Espèce sauvage, le Grand hamster d’Alsace (Critecus critecus) voit son alimentation se standardiser à cause de la montée en puissance de la monoculture du maïs. Un régime qui provoque chez le rongeur des crises de démence aboutissant au cannibalisme de sa progéniture.