News

Global environmental change is generally bad news for life on Earth. But the future may not be entirely doom and gloom. Cambridge biologist Luca Telesca and colleagues have conducted the first large-scale examination of natural variation in biomineralisation in ecologically and economically important Atlantic mussel species Mytilus edulis and M. trossulus within their natural habitats. Little is known about the processes, which allow species such as these to vary regionally. So the researchers tested the mussels ability to vary the production and composition of their calcareous shells which provides them with a resilience to the impacts of climate change in their shallow marine habitat.

Perching birds, ranging from sparrows, tits and jays to the South African White-bellied Sunbird, form the largest and most diverse group of living birds. With over 6,000 species belonging to 143 families, the passerines, as they are technically known, have had astonishing evolutionary and geographical success. Within the last 45 million years they have spread out around the world. Now, for the first time the evolutionary tree of all major groups of perching birds has been mapped out in a study involving Daniel Field of the Department of Earth Sciences in Cambridge and led by Carl Oliveros and Brant Faircloth of Louisiana State University.