The global scientific community has pushed back on the claim that paracetamol during pregnancy is linked to autism, saying there is no relationship between the two.

The Guana River Estuary in northeast Florida is impaired due to excess nutrients, which can fuel eutrophic algal blooms. Oysters naturally filter estuaries, but modern data is limited. This project ai...

Scientific Reports - Coral restoration can drive rapid increases in reef accretion potential

Conservation hatcheries aim to produce fish for supplementation of wild populations, but hatchery environments may drive phenotypic divergence from wild fish. These diverged traits may have reduced fi...

Species from diverse animal lineages have conserved groups of orthologous genes together on the same chromosome for over half a billion years since the last common ancestor of bilaterians. Although no...

Fetching and alignment of population-level sampling for DNA genetic markers from NCBI - marctollis/macrogenetics

Survey of five Australian avians finds numerous discordant individuals, including a genetically male bird that had laid an egg

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. sat down with Scripps News for a wide-ranging interview, discussing mRNA vaccine funding policy changes and a recent shooting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The accelerating loss of coral reefs worldwide due to anthropogenic climate change has led to a myriad of studies aimed at understanding the basis of coral resilience to support reef conservation. Her...

Genomic data have revealed that traditional coral taxonomy based on skeletal morphology does not accurately reflect the true diversity of, or systematic relationships within, the order Scleractinia. Here, we apply an integrated taxonomic approach combining molecular analysis and morphological comparison of type material with specimens collected from across the Indo-Pacific to revise the taxonomy of a clade within the species-rich and ecologically dominant reef coral genus Acropora, which includes the species Acropora hyacinthus (Dana, 1846) and related species (termed the ‘hyacinthus species complex’). Using a collection of specimens comprising preserved tissues, field images and skeletal vouchers collected from 22 regions spanning the Indian and Pacific Oceans, we generated a phylogenomic reconstruction using targeted capture of ultraconserved elements (UCEs) and exons, combined with examination of morphological characters, to generate primary species hypotheses (PSHs) for the clade. We then tested PSHs by calling Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNPs) from the genomic dataset to provide additional lines of evidence to support the delineation of species within the clade and revise the taxonomy of the group. Our integrated approach recovered 16 lineages sufficiently delineated to be designated as distinct species. Based on comparison of our specimens to type material and geographical distributions, we remove nine species from synonymy: A. turbinata (Verrrill, 1864), A. surculosa (Dana, 1846), A. patella (Studer, 1878), A. flabelliformis (Milne-Edwards, 1860), A. conferta (Quelch, 1886), A pectinata (Brook, 1892), A. recumbens (Brook, 1892), A. sinensis (Brook, 1893) and A. bifurcata Nemenzo, 1971. We also describe five new species: A. harriottae sp. nov. from south-eastern Australia, A. tersa sp. nov. from eastern Australia and the Western Pacific, A. nyinggulu sp. nov. from the eastern Indian Ocean, Indo-Australian Archipelago and southern Japan, A. uogi sp. nov. from the western Pacific and A. kalindae sp. nov. from north-eastern Australia. Our data reveal that the species richness within this clade of Acropora is far greater than currently assumed due to both overlooked provincialism across the Indo-Pacific as well as lumping of distinct sympatric species based on superficial morphological similarity. Given the key ecological role tabular Acropora play on Indo-Pacific reefs our findings have significant implications for reef conservation and management, for example, A. harriottae sp. nov. is restricted to a small geographical region of south-eastern Australia and is therefore at comparatively high risk of extinction. ZooBank: urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:6C42546C-9253-4639-9FF4-D8D80808D78C

Regulatory action could facilitate cross-border efforts to retain ecosystem function

Abstract. Gene family expansion illustrates a critical aspect of evolutionary adaptation. However, the mechanisms by which gene family expansions emerge an

Communications Earth & Environment - Large seasonal temperature variability exacerbated the negative effects of reduced carbonate saturation on coral calcification during the mid-Miocene,...