News

The electric pulses emitted by electric fish can be quite variable in their duration: and as it turns out the reason can be quite “shocking.” Jason Gallant has received a three-year, $680,000 National Science Foundation grant to continue work on a discovery that this variation may be due to unusual changes in a common protein called a potassium channel.

Fred Dyer was a co-author on a new paper published in The American Naturalist that explores how computers could begin to evolve learning in the same way as natural organisms did – with implications for many fields, including artificial intelligence.

Samuel Ayebare, a Ph.D. student in Integrative Biology and the Ecology, Evolutionary Biology and Behavior (EEBB) program, is the first MSU student to receive a prestigious Beinecke African Conservation Scholarship from the Wildlife Conservation Society.

By studying how fish regenerate fins, Ingo Braasch’s team pinpointed the genes and the mechanisms responsible that drive the regrowth.

Allison Sussman and Elise Zipkin show that conservation and construction decisions should rely on multiple approaches to determine waterbird “hotspots,” not just on one analysis method as is often done.

Mariah Meek received a two-year, $633,000 grant from the Delta Stewardship Council and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to study Chinook salmon in the California Central Valley using an improved genomics tool to characterize life history diversity and promote resilience.

Three Integrative Biology graduate students were among 11 MSU graduate students recently awarded Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program fellowships. Isabela Borges, Lindsey Kemmerling, and Corinn Rutkoski will participate in the program.

Monarch butterfly numbers have been dropping precipitously for more than two decades. Scientists studying monarch butterflies have traditionally focused on two sources for their decline – winter habitat loss in Mexico and fewer milkweed plants in the Midwest. The Zipkin team has found that a critical piece of the butterfly’s annual cycle was missing – the fall migration.

When it comes to advancing social status, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know ­– for humans and spotted hyenas alike. Eli Strauss and Kay Holekamp show that hyenas that form strong coalitions can gain social status, which can have lasting benefits over many generations.

African carnivores face numerous threats from humans. So, it’s a fair assumption that the presence of more humans automatically equates to decreases across the board for carnivores. New research led by Matthew Farr and Elise Zipkin shows that’s not always the case. 

The American Ornithological Society recently named Catherine Lindell the 15th editor in chief of The Condor: Ornithological Applications, one of two peer-reviewed journals published by the American Ornithological Society.

Richard Lenski was inducted into the American Philosophical Society — the oldest "learned society" in the United States — on Nov. 9, 2018 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

How predictable is evolution? The answer has long been debated by biologists grappling with the extent to which history affects the repeatability of evolution. A review published in Science explores the complexity of evolution’s predictability in extraordinary detail.