Word: biologists
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...fish's egg-laying response. This year, the team helped create some 150 million bluefin eggs, of which they took about 3 million to try to hatch. Of those, "maybe 50 [will] survive to the weight of one gram, or about 50 days [old]," says Aurelio Ortega, a biologist on the project. "We're still a long way off. Even five years would be very optimistic...
...pictures, sent by a biologist in the northern Italian town of Lerici in July, marked the first time the species Mnemiopsis leidyi, a thumb-size jellyfish known as the sea walnut, had been documented in the western Mediterranean Sea. Native to the Atlantic coast of the U.S., Mnemiopsis was introduced to the Black Sea in the 1980s - most likely from the ballast water of oil tankers - and played an instrumental role in the collapse of the region's fisheries. "Now the question is, Will it do in the Mediterranean the same thing it did in the Black Sea?" Boero says...
Climate change, too, is likely playing a role. As ocean temperatures rise, jellyfish are reproducing faster, and tropical species are beginning to extend their range. "It could be a big economic problem for countries like Australia," says Anthony Richardson, a marine biologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. If the deadly box jellyfish that plague the country's northern beaches migrate south to the Gold Coast, it could have huge implications for the region's multibillion-dollar tourism industry. (See TIME's special report on the environment...
...team of scientists led by Yale University evolutionary biologist Stephen Stearns suggests that if the natural selection of fitter traits is no longer driven by survival, perhaps it owes to differences in women's fertility. "Variations in reproductive success still exist among humans, and therefore some traits related to fertility continue to be shaped by natural selection," Stearns says. That is, women who have more children are more likely to pass on certain traits to their progeny. (See the top 10 scientific discoveries...
Steve Jones, an evolutionary biologist at University College London who has previously held that human evolution was nearing its end, says the Framingham study is indeed an important example of how natural selection still operates through inherited differences in reproductive ability. But Jones argues that variation in female fertility - as measured in the Framingham study - is a much less important factor in human evolution than differences in male fertility. Sperm hold a much higher chance of carrying an error or mutation than an egg, especially among older men. "While it used to be that men had many children in older...