The half-ounce songbirds that fly 1,800 miles nonstop over the Atlantic Ocean to winter in South America haven’t had a lot to chirp about lately. The number of Blackpoll warblers (Setophaga striata) documented on the move through migration monitoring sites in the Gulf of Maine region has declined dramatically at some locations over the last […]
Read more
Endangered shortnose sturgeon have rediscovered habitat in the Penobscot River that had been inaccessible to the species for more than 100 years prior to the removal of the Veazie Dam in 2013. University of Maine researchers confirmed evidence that three female shortnose sturgeon were in the area between Veazie and Orono in mid-October. Researchers had […]
Read more
Andrew Galimberti, an entomology graduate student at the University of Maine, was part of a research team that discovered that bigger isn’t necessarily better for a fish during an extinction event. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and UMaine found that for at least 40 million years following the last massive extinction, small, fast-reproducing fish […]
Read more
Males and females of many species are often visibly different from one another. Scientists call these differences ‘sexual dimorphism’ and it has been studied extensively by evolutionary biologists all of the way back to Charles Darwin. But what is not yet clearly understood is how these differences impact an entire ecosystem.
Read more
The extinction of mammoths, ground sloths and other large plant-eaters thousands of years ago triggered shifts in global habitats and changes in ecosystems, says University of Maine paleoecologist Jacquelyn Gill.
Read more