Since the Victorian era, categorizing the natural world has challenged scientists. No group has presented a challenge as tricky as the protists, the tiny, complex life forms that are neither plants ...

A total of 359 soil samples collected from five continents (Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe and South America) were investigated for the presence/absence of soil ciliate species. Merging records by ...

A new study provides support for Darwin's hypothesis that the struggle for existence is stronger between more closely related species than those distantly related. While ecologists generally accept ...

A new study published today (June 14) in Ecology Letters provides experimental evidence for a an assumption of evolutionary biology accepted since Darwin first proposed it in 1859's On the Origin of ...

Researchers have combined mathematical models, marine science, and metagenomics to answer a decades-old question - why are there so many species in the ocean? Ocean plankton are the drifters of the ...

On the dinner plate that is planet Earth, there exists a veritable buffet of viruses — an amount of biomass that is the equivalent of about 25 billion human beings. So perhaps it’s a bit baffling that ...

Plankton are the invisible engines of life on Earth, producing much of the planet's oxygen and forming the foundation of the oceanic food chain. They are also incredibly diverse, with tens of ...