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chien viverrin

COVID-19: animal species identified as potential sources of the pandemic

In a study published in the journal Cell on 19 September, an international research team led by scientists from CNRS1 , the University of Arizona and Scripps Research in California has identified animal species likely to have served as intermediate hosts for SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. These species were present at the end of […]

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Cette photo montre un collembole Folsomia candida adulte mesurant environ 2mm de long.

Diversity, plasticity and asynchrony of senescence in the Collembola Folsomia candida

Flourishing recent comparative studies on senescence have revealed an uncovered diversity across the tree of life of the shapes of the age trajectories of mortality (actuarial senescence) and to a lesser extent of reproduction (reproductive senescence). Evolutionary theories have been called up to explain why some species suffer from positive senescence while others benefit from […]

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aculéates

Müllerian mimicry among bees and wasps: a review of current knowledge and future avenues of research

A study in Biological Reviews led by researchers from the Institute of ecology and environmental sciences – Paris, the Institute of Systematics, Evolution, Biodiversity and the Center for Ecology and Conservation Sciences makes the synthesis of published knowledge on Mullerian mimicry in aculeate wasps and bees. It argues that aculeates may be one of the most diverse groups of mimetic organisms and that the diversity of their mimetic interactions is currently underexplored.

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reine termite

How do termite queens and kings stay healthy for decades?

Reproductive and worker castes of termites differ greatly in their morphology and behavior but also in their fertility and longevity. Kings and queens of the highly social termite, Macrotermes natalensis, live for decades, with the queen laying thousands of eggs per day. Workers are sterile and only live a few weeks. In our HFSP project, we investigated the regulatory mechanisms involved in generating such diverse phenotypes. Our previous results indicate that well-regulated transcription allows reproductive castes to overcome simultaneously several well-known hallmarks of aging.

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Florence Débarre, CNRS bronze medal !

The bronze medal rewards initial research that has established a researcher as a specialist in their field. This distinction is a form of encouragement to pursue research that is already well underway and proving successful.

Florence Débarre, CNRS researcher at iEES Paris, is one of the 2022 CNRS talents rewarded for her research in evolutionary ecology and epidemiology and its implications for better understanding the evolution of the COVID19 virus.

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How to live in the city when you are an ant? (Live City of Paris)

As part of a partnership with the City of Paris, several members of the laboratory (Basile Finand, Céline Bocquet, Pierre Federici, Thibaud Monnin et Nicolas Loeuille (“EERI” Team of “DCFE” Department and “ESEAE” Team of “EcoEvo” Department) sample the soil fauna and in particular the ants in the Parisian green spaces. To popularize and explain this […]

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mésange

A stressful life in the city affects birds’ genes

Great tits living in cities are genetically different from great tits in the countryside. This is what researchers have found in a unique study, where they examined populations of great tits in nine large European cities.

The researchers compared the city bird genes with the genes of their relatives in the countryside. It did not matter if the great tits lived in Milan, Malmö or Madrid: in order to handle an environment created by humans, the birds evolved in a similar way.

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papillon

Habitat fragmentation prevents species from tracking climate change

Climate changeaffectsbiodiversity globally, by forcing species to shift their distribution to track the changes in temperature. An international collaboration between scientists from France, Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland shows, in an article published in the journal Ecology Letters,that habitat fragmentation caused by human activity affects distribution shifts in butterfly species and, hence, their capacity to cope with climate change.

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