Biologist

As It Happens6:291st images humpback whale sex is between 2 malesWhen biologist Stephanie Stack first saw the photographs of two humpback whales mating in the warm waters of Hawaii, she says her mind was "completely blown.""When I realized that it was two males, it was not what I was expecting," she told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. "I thought, oh my gosh, this is incredible."Stack, chief biologist at the Pacific Whale Foundation in Maui, says this is the first time humpback whale sex has been documented. She…

As It Happens6:13More than 100 possible new marine species discovered in a single deepsea expeditionDuring a research expedition off the coast of Chile, Erin Easton says her colleagues were constantly showing her some amazing new sea creature they'd just discovered."It would just be, like, 'Erin, Erin, Erin, look!'" Easton, a marine scientist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal."It is beyond my wildest dreams of what we could have expected. It felt like every time we went…

Some creatures are so quiet, they appear to make no sound at all.When a male treehopper calls out for a mate, he shakes his abdomen 100 times a second to produce a low sound that vibrates through the stem of the plant he is standing on. While that sound is audible to other treehoppers — particularly the female treehoppers he's trying to attract — it's outside the frequency that humans can hear.In Love and Rivals, the second episode of Secret World of Sound, we listen in on dime-sized treehoppers in conversation. But how…

As It Happens6:24Great apes get a kick out of 'playfully teasing' each other, study findsWhat do you call it when a chimpanzee offers his buddy a delicious piece of fruit only to pull his hand away at the last second? Or when a bonobo repeatedly pokes, prods and pulls on the hair of an older relative not hard enough to hurt, but just enough to be annoying?It's not quite play, argues anthropologist Erica Cartmill, but it's not quite aggression either. It's "playful teasing." And, according to a new study, it's a very…

When B.C. marine scientist Anna Hall encountered a very lost loggerhead turtle in waters near Victoria over the weekend, she knew it faced a grim fate at sea."The turtle would not have survived," said Hall, principal scientist at consulting group Sea View Marine Sciences."Had the turtle stayed in the ocean, either it would have died due to hypothermia, or it would have been hit by a boat. It was just moving so, so slowly."Hall was the first marine biologist to respond Sunday after a resident near Pedder Bay between…

As It Happens6:35How scientists tracked the 1,000 km journey of a woolly mammoth using its tuskWith nothing more than a tusk, researchers were able to track the 1,000 kilometre journey of a woolly mammoth that lived 14,000 years ago. "The fact that we can actually regenerate her movement, her place along a landscape … all comes from a few remains at this site gives us insight into behaviour of an animal that once existed and lived with ancestors of the first people here in Canada," Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary…

An invasive species of crayfish that reproduces by cloning itself was discovered last summer in a Burlington, Ont., park — the first time the marbled crayfish has been identified in the wild in North America.Since then, a group of experts has been working to stop the species from spreading. The crayfish are in City View park, on Burlington's southwest border with Hamilton.Brook Schryer, a member of the working group responding to the detection, told CBC Hamilton that it seems the population was contained after the pond…

The average litre of bottled water has nearly a quarter million pieces of ever-so-tiny nanoplastics, detected and categorized for the first time by a microscope using dual lasers.Scientists long figured there were lots of these microscopic plastic pieces, but until researchers at Columbia and Rutgers universities did their calculations they never knew how many or what kind.Looking at five samples each of three common bottled water brands, researchers found particle levels ranged from 110,000 to 400,000 per litre,…

While using mRNA as medicine is new, mRNA has been inside you for your entire life. The cells in your body create mRNAs that serve as instructions to make specific proteins you need to function. Researchers can create new mRNAs to correct those instructions when they aren’t working. I am a molecular biologist who studies how cells control their mRNAs to make the proteins they need, a basic question of how life works at the cellular level. While most scientists studying mRNAs are not creating new drugs, this…

As It Happens6:28Why do these mosquitos keep perching on the nostrils of frogs who want to eat them?John Gould had been snapping pictures of mosquitoes on frogs for years before he noticed a trend — the bloodsuckers always seem to land right on the amphibians' noses."You would think that a frog would be the worst place to land, because frogs love to eat mosquitoes," Gould, a behavioural biologist at Australia's University of Newcastle, told As It Happens host Nil Köksal. Nevertheless, Gould has collected more than a dozen…