Parasites may do more than weaken animals – they can reshape the signals used to choose mates. Studying male green treefrogs in the wild, researchers found that tongueworm infections subtly alter mating calls, changing their frequency and duration. Females avoided the most heavily infected males but sometimes favored moderately infected ones, suggesting they weigh multiple cues at once. The findings reveal how parasites can influence sexual selection by reshaping the acoustic signals females use to evaluate potential mates.

Researchers led by the University of Iowa have described and named a new crocodile species that roamed a region in Africa more than 3 million years ago. The species is named Lucy’s hunter, because it overlapped with the famed Lucy and her hominin kin and would have hunted them. Results published in the Journal of Systematic Palaeontology.

The hollowed-out skeletons of a bleached reef in the Pacific Ocean are changing scientists’ understanding of the factors that promote — or hinder—coral reef recovery.

Tick-borne diseases are on the rise in the northeastern US, with many ticks carrying more than one pathogen. So reports a recent analysis published in Ecosphere by researchers at Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and the SUNY Center for Vector-Borne Diseases at Upstate Medical University.

Most lethal mutations in wild fruit flies are driven by newly transferred jumping genes, not small DNA errors, according to a new study from Duke University.

What started out as a response to labor shortages in poultry processing plants during the COVID-19 pandemic has turned into a robotics system that can learn by imitating human movements to handle chickens. Using an advanced imitation learning algorithm and camera perceptions, researchers with the Arkansas Agricultural Experiment Station have developed ChicGrasp, a dual-jaw robotic gripper with pinchers that can grasp a chicken carcass by the legs, lift and hang it on a shackle conveyor to be moved on for further processing. Results of the study behind the development of ChicGrasp were published in Advanced Robotics Research. All computer-aided design files, code and datasets from the project were released as open source, providing what the team describes as a reproducible benchmark for agricultural robotics and robot learning.