Why are nematodes so successful extremophiles?

Why are clicks so exclusive ?

Clicks occur abundantly in the languages of southern Africa, but are not found anywhere else. This is unexpected since the clicks seem to be both auditorily salient and easy to produce. This paper suggests that the reason for the areal skewness of clicks lies in the African phonetictypological environment rather than in production or perception constraints. In particular, clicks are limited to ...

Cattle nematodes resistant to anthelmintics: why so few cases?

The apparent lack of anthelmintic resistant nematodes in cattle is due to the management systems used with most cattle and the lack of surveys for resistance. With extensive beef grazing or with beef suckler herds a large percentage of worms are in refugia (not exposed to anthelmintic) and few anthelmintic treatments are used. With dairy replacement heifers resistance can become a problem unles...

Why are so many trees hollow?

In many living trees, much of the interior of the trunk can be rotten or even hollowed out. Previously, this has been suggested to be adaptive, with microbial or animal consumption of interior wood producing a rain of nutrients to the soil beneath the tree that allows recycling of those nutrients into new growth via the trees roots. Here I propose an alternative (non-exclusive) explanation: suc...

Why Are So Many Bird Flowers Red?

Why are so many bird fl owers red? PLoS Biol 2(10): e350. and Luis Santamaría. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Open access, freely available online M ost bird-pollinated fl owers are both red and rich ...

Observational studies: why are they so important?