All animals need water to live, but not all of them drink it from their surroundings. Drinking free rivers or puddles is just one many ways that get the they need. Until recently, koalas were thought most leaves eat. But, after years koala watchers getting caught in rain, scientists and volunteers began sharing similar, strange stories. These sleepy waking up during storms giving tree bark a li...

Introduction Associations between bark beetles (Coleoptera: Curculionidae: Scolytinae, or family Scolytidae, depending on the classification used, Bright 1993; Marvaldi et al. 2002) and fungi are varied and well known, but mycophagy (fungal feeding) by bark beetles has received relatively little attention. This may be due to the rarity or relative unimportance of fungal feeding by bark beetles,...

Changes in physicochemical characteristics, chemical structures and maturity of swine, cattle and chicken manures and composts during 70-day composting without addition of bulking agents were investigated. Physicochemical characteristics were measured by routine analyses and chemical structures by solid-state 13C NMR and FT-IR. Three manures were of distinct properties. Their changes in physico...

Traditionally, molecular studies of plant species have used leaves as the source of DNA. However, sampling leaves from tall tree species can be quite difficult and expensive. We developed a sequence of procedures for using stem bark as a source of DNA from Leguminosae trees of the Atlantic Forest and the Cerrado. Leguminosae is an important species-rich family in these two highly diverse and en...

M. cecropioides is a tree that grows with great rapidity in high forests of the tropical African zone stretching from Guinea to Zaire and Angola. The tree has smooth bark, grey to brownish-green in color with prominent brown lenticels (1). Ethnomedical uses of the plant leaves as oxytocic (2) antihypertensive (3-5) and antiglycaemic (6) agents have been scientifically validated, while hypotensi...