Biology Ecology

News

Small-scale fisheries in Southeast Asia. (Photo: Matsuishi Takashi Fritz)
21 Mar 2025
Despite decades of warnings about overfishing, Southeast Asia’s capture fisheries have proven remarkably robust.
Anemonefish seem to understand what food to feed their host sea anemones for their mutual benefit.
26 Feb 2025
Anemonefish provision food they don’t eat to increase size of host sea anemones
Edward Hopper's Nighthawks with medaka fish heads in place of human heads
12 Feb 2025
Field observations in natural river environment hold clues to easing model organisms’ life in labs
harmful algal blooms study_hiroshima university
07 Feb 2025
Because of climate change, harmful algal blooms are increasing in frequency and intensity. New science helps demystify the frequent harmful algal blooms in the Pacific off the coast of Chile by studying how algae species interact with each other and their environment.
 Dr Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh
06 Feb 2025
Dr Wan Faridah Akmal Jusoh of Monash University Malaysia's School of Science has been named a 2025 Explorers Club 50 honoree for her outstanding contributions to biodiversity research and conservation.
Great Barrier reef
15 Jan 2025
Tsuyoshi Watanabe uses corals to understand the environment of the past and what it can tell us about people living then.
14 Jan 2025
A new study has lifted the lid on five species of root-lesion nematodes living in maize crops across New Zealand - and suggested the existence of a hitherto-unsuspected cryptic species.
Medaka mating
23 Dec 2024
Intimate insights into relationship between cost of gamete production and sexual selection
Editor's Choice
06 Dec 2024
Venice of the Pacific, Membrane transformers, Diverse meals, Nano dots and spirals & Extinct swimmers. Read all in the latest Editor's Choice.
Chlorophyll fluorescence measures plants’ ability to repair photoinhibition
27 Nov 2024
Clues found relating repair of photosynthetic protein complex to how plants survive in colder regions
20 Nov 2024
Typically, closely related animal species have difficulty coexisting because they are competing for similar resources. Despite eating the same figs, binturong, small-toothed palm, masked palm, and common palm civets do coexist together. To understand how they coexist, a new study explores their degree of faunivory.
Oomycete, Globisporangium ultimum, on metalaxyl-containing medium
17 Jun 2024
Study suggests mycoviral infections affect the ecology of host oomycete
Helper (left) and dominant breeder/parent (right) of Neolamprologus savoryi
14 Jun 2024
Study shows fish may use punishment to promote help from their offspring
Amur tigers in Russia.
24 Apr 2024
The recently concluded Sustainable Finance for Tiger Landscapes Conference convened tiger range countries, private and public sector donors, international development agencies, the Tiger Conservation Coalition, and other conservation organisations to discuss innovative solutions to sustainably finance tiger landscape conservation.
During masting, trees produce an increased amount of acorns. (Photo: Lea Végh)
22 Feb 2024
The effects of a phenomenon called tree masting on ecosystems and food webs can be better understood thanks to new theoretical models validated by real world observations.
Wildlife ecologist Miyabi Nakabayashi
21 Nov 2023
Out of this living laboratory emerged unexpected insights on coexistence from an “unusual” source.
04 Sep 2023
In recent years, an emerging zoonotic pathogen called E. albertii, transmitted by wild animals such as raccoons, has garnered attention due to its remarkable similarities to several strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli), including O157, and its potential to cause severe illness, particularly in children. A research group at Osaka Metropolitan University has developed a novel culture medium that allows for the selective cultivation of E. albertii from raccoon fecal samples. This enabled the successful isolation of E. albertii even from samples with very low quantities of this bacterium. Their findings are expected to further elucidate the bacteriological characteristics of E. albertii and to contribute to the control of foodborne illnesses.
Bamboo flowering
29 Aug 2023
A long-lived monocarpic species of bamboo, Phyllostachys nigra var. henonis, only flowers once every 120 years before it dies. The upcoming flowering event for this species does not bode well for its continued long-term survival, as most flowers are not producing viable seeds.
Asia Research News Editors Choice
19 May 2023
Mushrooms 🍄get chattier after rainfall 🌧️, Two-organ chip answers fatty liver questions, History maps 🗺️vs future simulations, Restoring vision in blindness. Plus in our blog: Myanmar: Through eyes of leadership. Read all in the latest Editor's Choice.
28 Apr 2023
Certain types of fungi can communicate with each other via electrical signals. But much remains unknown about how and when they do so. A group of researchers recently headed to the forest to measure the electrical signals of Laccaria bicolor mushrooms, finding that their electrical signals increased following rainfall.
Map of the eight Arctic marine areas included in the study (Irene D. Alabia, et al. Scientific Reports. March 11, 2023).
04 Apr 2023
Marine predators have expanded their ranges into the Arctic waters over the last twenty years, driven by climate change and associated increases in productivity.
28 Mar 2023
A group including Osaka Metropolitan University researchers discovered that the rhodopsin—a protein in the eye that detects light—of whale sharks has changed to efficiently detect blue light, which penetrates deep-sea water easily. The amino acid substitutions–one of which is counterintuitively associated with congenital stationary night blindness in humans—aid in detecting the low levels of light in the deep-sea. Although these changes make the whale shark rhodopsin less thermally stable the deep-sea temperature, allows their rhodopsin to keep working. This suggests that the unique adaptation evolved to function in the low-light low-temperature environment where whale sharks live.
19 Dec 2022
Researchers from Osaka University have developed a culture system using pluripotent cells from southern and northern white rhinos, which was refined to produce primordial germ cell-like cells (PGCLCs). These cells are the equivalent of primordial germ cells, the origin of eggs and sperm. The study marks an important first step in the potential production of northern white rhino gametes, which could be used in breeding programs, and is the first to induce PGCLCs in a wild animal.
06 Dec 2022
World's first research into relationship between rich-in-biodiversity garden greenery and health/well-being launched by University of Tokyo and Sekisui House Ltd.
World’s first LED light from rice husks
11 Apr 2022
Milling rice to separate the grain from the husks, produces about 100 million tons of rice husk waste globally each year. Scientists searching for a scalable method to fabricate quantum dots have developed a way to recycle rice husks to create the first silicon quantum dot LED light. Their new method transforms agricultural waste into state-of-the-art light-emitting diodes in a low-cost, environmentally friendly way.
Three of the fish species selected for this study: Aluterus scriptus (left), Siganus fuscescens (center) and Amphiprion frenatus (right). (Photos courtesy of Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan).
10 Mar 2022
Scientists have developed a model that predicts six tropical fish species will expand into northern parts of Japan as sea temperatures rise.
02 Feb 2022
Researchers from Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo find that the occurrence of red snow is closely tied to the length of the snow melt season and new snowfall events
Photo of the entire amber-encased fossil specimen of Huablattula hui, a cretaceous cockroach (Ryo Taniguchi, et al. The Science of Nature. September 28, 2021).
25 Jan 2022
Studying the sensory organs of a 100-million-year-old cockroach offers new insights into how the species may have lived.
The experimental system used in the research. Water is pumped from the main Horonai stream, through 48 artificial stream chambers, and then flows back out to the the main stream (Photo: Samuel Ross).
12 Jan 2022
Predator species may buffer the negative impacts of climate change by mitigating against the loss of biodiversity, according to new research led by scientists in Trinity College Dublin and joined by scientists at Hokkaido University
23 Nov 2021
A joint research team at the Division of Biotechnology, DGIST, confirmed that microplastics(MPs) ingested orally accumulate in the brain and act as neurotoxic substances.

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Researchers

Wan F. A. Jusoh is currently a Senior Lecturer in Biodiversity and Conservation and serves as the Honours Program Director (Malaysia) at the School of Science, Monash University Malaysia. Her research focuses on the intersection of biodiversity and the history of natural heritage, ranging from studying flashing fireflies to reconstructing timelines of how ecosystems have evolved.
SpiderThailand
Biology of Spiders is my interest for research. Thai spiders are my focus group.
Eisuke Hasegawa
Dr. Eisuke Hasegawa is an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Agriculture, Hokkaido University, where he heads the Animal Ecology Laboratory. His research interests include animal ecology; evolutionary biology; natural selection; sociality; and ethology.
Yukio Yasui
Dr. Yukio Yasui is an Associate Professor at Kagawa University. He has dedicated his research work to ecology, ethology and evolutionary biology studies, with his more recent work on the evolution of sex.
Nguyen Huu Nghia
Nguyen Huu Nghia is the Director of the Center for Environment and Disease Monitoring in Aquaculture (CEDMA) at the Research Institute for Aquaculture No.1 (RIA1) under Vietnam’s Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development. He has co-managed various research efforts in Vietnam aquaculture as well as published recent research into the use of nanobubbles.
Dr. Natrah Fatin Bt Mohd Ikhsan
Dr. Ikhsan is an associate professor at the Department of Aquaculture, University Putra Malaysia. She specializes in the field of Aquatic Microbial Ecology particularly in the development of innovative and sustainable microbial management strategies through understanding of the host-microbe interaction for enhanced microbial stability.
https://www.iium.edu.my/v2/
Dr. Irina's research focuses on sustainability, including an analysis of environmental management, the urban environment, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and education for sustainable development, or ESD, and its application in real-world contexts.
Picture of Prof. Gavin James Smith
Prof Smith’s research programme primarily investigates the ecology and evolution of zoonotic viruses and the molecular epidemiology of human respiratory pathogens.
Guangshun Jiang
Guangshun Jiang does research in ecology and zoology with a special focus on big feline ecology and conservation research.
Prof. (Dr.) Pranay Dilip Abhang
Professor and Head Department of Food Science and Technology K.J.E.I's Trinity College of Arts, Commerce and Science Pune, Maharashtra, India
Jorge García Molinos is an aquatic ecologist broadly interested in global change ecology and macroecology.
Professor Qiu Jianwen currently works at the Department of Biology, Hong Kong Baptist University. He is interested in ecology and adaptation of apple snails, biodiversity and systematics of polychaetes, stress responses in shallow-water corals, and deep-sea biology. His research involves the use of various molecular tools including transcriptomics, proteomics and genomics.

Giants in history

Lim Boo Liat (21 August 1926 – 11 July 2020), a leading authority in the conservation of Malaysia’s biological diversity, had his initial interest in the outdoors piqued by nature lessons in school. Lim, who helped found the National Zoo of Malaysia and re-establish the Malaysian Nature Society, had a particular interest in researching zoonotic diseases associated with small animals.