What makes obese cats prone to diabetes? That’s one question researchers at the University of Calgary Faculty of Veterinary Medicine (UCVM) and the University of Saskatchewan Western College of Veterinary Medicine want to answer as they work to learn more about feline diabetes.

It’s playtime for piglets at the Prairie Swine Centre (PSC), where Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM) researcher Dr. Yolande Seddon hopes to find out whether piglets that play are better able to cope with life’s stresses.

It’s not easy to catch an Egyptian vulture.

Evan Buechley knows. He’s hunkered down near garbage dumps from Ethiopia to Armenia, waiting for the highly intelligent birds to trigger a harmless trap. But no matter how well he and other researchers hid the traps, he says, “somehow the birds could always sense that something was up.”

Last year, University of British Columbia zoologist Wayne Maddison travelled to the highlands of southern Mexico in pursuit of undiscovered species of jumping spiders. He kept a journal of his adventures, documenting his encounters with resplendently beautiful arachnids.

NOAA scientist Carol Stepien will present research results at a public forum this week in Toledo, Ohio, on how local bait shops, anglers and the public can prevent invasive fish from accidentally being released into the Great Lakes.

A population of exotic invasive Cuban treefrogs has been discovered in New Orleans, more than 430 miles (700 kilometers) from the nearest known population in Florida, making this the first known breeding population in the mainland United States outside that state, reports a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

When the rains eventually blanket northwest Costa Rica, ushering in the country’s wet season, a booming chorus of yellow toads will fill the tropical forest.

Primatologist Jane Goodall came to the University of Toronto over the weekend to mark Earth Day with a discussion about her life, work and the need to protect the planet.

A new WCS paper published in the journal BioScience finds that the enormous trends toward population stabilization, poverty alleviation, and urbanization are rewriting the future of biodiversity conservation in the 21st century, offering new hope for the world’s wildlife and wild places.

The vampire bat lives up to its name. Its diet consists of blood, which it gets by biting animals and lapping up their blood. The vampire bat prefers to feed on domestic animals such as cows and pigs. When it does so, there is a risk of transmission of pathogens such as rabies. Now, a new study lead by Assistant Professor Kristine Bohmann from the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen, describes a new DNA method to efficiently screen many vampire bat blood meal and faecal samples with a high success rate and thereby determine which animals the vampire bats have fed on blood from. Furthermore, the authors show that the technique can be used to simultaneously assess the vampire bat’s population structure.