Avian malaria or bird malaria has been linked to significant declines in captive and wild birds, such as penguins and Hawaiian forest birds. Common blood parasites, like Plasmodium that spread through mosquitoes and Haemoproteus that are transmitted through louse flies and biting midges, cause the disease in birds.
Sometime in the middle of October each year, the Bomrr clan in Nagaland rush to the caves in Mimi village. With a good stock of burning firewood, men and women are ready for the bat harvest festival—an annual ritual where anywhere between 7,000 to 25,000 bats are suffocated or smashed to their deaths. These bats, the clan believes, have medicinal properties and can cure diseases like diarrhoea and body ache, and increase vigour. Now, a new study has shown that these bats, rather than being a cure to diseases, carry deadly filoviruses that could infect humans.
In a new study, researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, and the Pennsylvania State University and Colorado State University in the USA, have studied how flies land on ceilings. The researchers have also explored how the fly’s brain integrates visual and balance-related inputs from the surroundings to generate appropriate movement in the wings and legs to achieve a perfect landing.
Every year, since 2010, the 29th of July is celebrated as the International Tiger Day to raise awareness about tiger conservation. India is home to over half of the world's tigers. New tiger populations are still being discovered, with one as recent as last year, in the Eastern Himalayas at altitudes of 3,630 metres. In 2010, India reportedly had 1,706 tigers, and this number increased to 2,226 in 2014. Isn't a 30% increase in population in just four years remarkable?
Researchers from NCBS, NHM, WII, Mizoram University, Pachunga University College, and IISc have documented a new genus and species of Natricine snake from Northeast India.
Tiny RNA lost during domestication created robust rice varieties, shows study by NCBS, Bengaluru.
Researchers from the National Centre for Biological Sciences, Bengaluru, have shown that grass-fuelled fires and seasonal drought, which are the characteristics of savannas, are also observed in the dry deciduous “forests” in India. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that these systems are, in fact, savannas.
Researchers at the NCBS, Bengaluru, studied how Swallowtails evolves and changes its appearance and colour at various stages of its elaborate life cycle to develop their colour defence strategies.
A newly discovered species of ground-dwelling gecko from Karnataka has been named Hemidactylus vijayraghavani, after Prof K VijayRaghavan, the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India. Mr Zeeshan A. Mirza, a researcher from Prof VijayRaghavan’s lab at the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), Bengaluru, is the person behind this discovery.
