Recent study into spider specimens collected from across China, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam and Madagascar over the past 15 years, revealed the striking number of 43 scaffold web spiders that have stayed hidden from science until now. By describing the new species in a paper published in the open access journal ZooKeys, scientists from […]
Shimmering carapaces and rattling claws make colourful freshwater crabs attractive to pet keepers. To answer the demand, fishermen are busy collecting and trading with the crustaceans, often not knowing what exactly they have handed over to their client. Luckily for science and nature alike, however, such ‘stock’ sometimes ends up in the hands of scientists, […]
Bamboo worms (family Maldanidae) comprise an easily recognizable family of bristle worms (class Polychaeta). Their common name they receive because of their elongated segments, ending with an appendage, which gives them the joint appearance of slender bamboo-shoots. These often fragile marine inhabitants can be found in mud-walled tubes in shelf sediments. However, bamboo worms are […]
A long-term project on insect-seed interactions, currently being carried out by researchers of the Institute of Zoology (Chinese Academy of Sciences) in a subtropical forest near Dujiangyan City, Sichuan, China, revealed the presence of larvae of an unknown weevil species eating the seeds in the pods of a shrubby legume. Scientists from the Institute of Zoology, […]
Black wattle, flowering trees also known as the Australian acacia, have been observed to rapidly spread around local airports in Yunnan province, southwestern China. According to the ecologists, this alien species and its extraordinary pace of invasion are to lead to new threats for both flight safety and local biodiversity. The five Chinese scientists, led […]
Minuscule snails defy current knowledge and scientific terminology about terrestrial “microsnails”. While examining soil samples collected from the base of limestone rocks in Guangxi Province, Southern China, scientists Barna Páll-Gergely and Takahiro Asami from Shinshu University, Adrienne Jochum, University and Natural History Museum of Bern, and András Hunyadi, found several minute empty light grey shells, which […]