Flourishing recent comparative studies on senescence have revealed an uncovered diversity across the tree of life of the shapes of the age trajectories of mortality (actuarial senescence) and to a lesser extent of reproduction (reproductive senescence). Evolutionary theories have been called up to explain why some species suffer from positive senescence while others benefit from […]
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A study in Biological Reviews led by researchers from the Institute of ecology and environmental sciences – Paris, the Institute of Systematics, Evolution, Biodiversity and the Center for Ecology and Conservation Sciences makes the synthesis of published knowledge on Mullerian mimicry in aculeate wasps and bees. It argues that aculeates may be one of the most diverse groups of mimetic organisms and that the diversity of their mimetic interactions is currently underexplored.
? Carbon Sinks | CNRS Images
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Great tits living in cities are genetically different from great tits in the countryside. This is what researchers have found in a unique study, where they examined populations of great tits in nine large European cities.
The researchers compared the city bird genes with the genes of their relatives in the countryside. It did not matter if the great tits lived in Milan, Malmö or Madrid: in order to handle an environment created by humans, the birds evolved in a similar way.
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Corentin DOURMAP is PhD student at iEES Paris. Last March 19th he participated in the final contest of Alliance Sorbonne Université of the Ma Thèse en 180 secondes contest. He has been able to describe simply his PhD project which consist in studying the seed development. He used a metaphor to be understood by general public: the building of a shelving unit. Watch the video of his performance.
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Urbanization changes the composition of pollinating insect communities. But who are the winners and losers of this
environmental filter? Vincent Zaninotto and his collaborators attempt to answer this question in an article published
in the journal Insects, comparing the diversity of pollinators in natural environments and in Parisian green spaces.
FEDKITO is a project funded by the PRIMA Foundation in which members of the CreA team are involved. It will prolong the shelf-life of perishable Mediterranean food products by providing innovative smart active packaging based on chitosan aromatized with essential oils together with advanced biosensors. ? Project web site Concept Somewhere between 15 and 50% […]
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Urban and forest colonies of the ant Temnothorax nylanderi respond differently to pollution?
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In the city, the seasonal patterns of activity of insect pollinators could be disturbed by the urban microclimate as well as by the presence of ornamental flora. To study this phenomenon, Vincent Zaninotto and his collaborators monitored the activity of insect pollinators in Paris and in the natural environment, from late winter to autumn. In […]
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“Here, we used 37 years of mark-recapture data in two nearby habitats inside a meadow viper Vipera ursinii population to quantify life expectancies, generation times and the shape of actuarial and reproductive senescence.”