this post was submitted on 07 Oct 2023
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Biodiversity

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A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.

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Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.

Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...

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Positively glowing: fluorescent mammals are far more common than earlier thought, study suggests (www.theguardian.com)
submitted 2 years ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/biodiversity@mander.xyz
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[–] autotldr@lemmings.world 2 points 2 years ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A luminous property, fluorescence has been described in recent years in Australian marsupials including platypuses, wombats, Tasmanian devils and echidnas.

Fluorescence was most common and most intense among nocturnal species, the researchers found, but it was also present in diurnal animals, which are active during the daytime, including the mountain zebra and the polar bear.

The study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, noted that “preservation may play a part in the intensity of the fluorescence observed for some specimens”.

“But we did that for other animals and we actually found the opposite – the brighter ones were actually the frozen ones and preservation actually decreased the intensity of the fluorescence,” Travouillon said, citing the koala, Tasmanian devil and echidna as examples.

Linda Reinhold, a zoologist at James Cook University who was not involved in the research, said “if fluorescence of the fur can be significantly underrepresented in [some] museum specimens … it boggles the mind as to what the phenomenon is like in these species in the wild”.

The exact purpose of fluorescence in mammals is still a mystery, but the study’s authors believe it could be a means to make animals appear brighter and “enhance visual signalling, especially for nocturnal species”.

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