Three major initiatives in biodiversity genomics — BIOSCAN, the Earth BioGenome Project and the Global Virome Project — have joined forces to deliver a “pandemic interception system” based upon comprehensive knowledge of pathogens and their hosts.
UC Davis scientists have pinpointed specific strains of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii that are killing southern sea otters, tracing them back to a bobcat and feral domestic cats from nearby watersheds.
As Californians have fled ferocious wildfires in recent years, UC Davis scientists, veterinarians, physicians and teachers have also been responding to that trauma: treating people and animals, investigating the effects on mental and physical health, and trying to discover what the future might hold as wildfires burn into towns and suburbs.
Many people set up hummingbird feeders in their yards to nurture and watch these high-energy pollinators. But could the sugar water they provide be impacting these tiny feathered friends?
The combination of ocean warming and an infectious wasting disease has devastated populations of large sunflower sea stars once abundant along the West Coast of North America in just a few years, according to a study co-led by the University of California, Davis, and Cornell University published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances.
For the last three years, not one calf has been born to the dwindling pods of black-and-white killer whales spouting geysers of mist off the coast in the Pacific Northwest. Their population decline is alarming and may be due to several factors.
