Most female frogs don’t call; most lack or have only rudimentary vocal cords. A typical female selects a mate from a chorus of males and then –silently – signals her beau. But the female concave-eared torrent frog, Odorrana tormota, has a more direct method of declaring her interest: She emits a high-pitched chirp that to the human ear sounds like that of a bird.

O. tormota lives in a noisy environment on the brushy edge of streams in the Huangshan Hot Springs, in central China, where waterfalls and rushing water provide a steady din. The frog has a recessed eardrum, said Albert Feng, a professor of molecular and integrative physiology at the University of Illinois and team leader on the new study.

In the world we know of only two species – the other one in southeast Asia – that have the concave ear,” Feng said. “The others all have eardrums on the body surface.”

Investigations continue into the cause of a mysterious illness that has resulted in the deaths of thousands of bats since March 2008. At more than 25 caves and mines in the northeastern U.S, bats exhibiting a condition now referred to as “white-nosed syndrome” have been dying.

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) recently issued a Wildlife Health Bulletin, advising wildlife and conservation officials throughout the U.S. to be on the lookout for the condition known as “white-nose syndrome” and to report suspected cases of the disease.

USGS wildlife disease specialist Dr. Kimberli Miller advises that "anyone finding sick or dead bats should avoid handling them and should contact their state wildlife conservation agency or the nearest U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service field office to report their observation.”

Scientists used to think that hermaphrodites, due to their low position in the evolutionary scale, did not have sufficiently developed sensory systems to assess the “quality” of their mates.

A new work has shown, however, that earthworms are able to detect the competition by fertilising the eggs that is going to find its sperm, tripling its volume when there is rivalry. This ability is even more refined as they are able to transfer more sperm to more fertile partners.

Hermaphrodites, organisms that have both female and male reproductive organs, such as earthworms, are denied the right to choose their partner. However, a study by researchers at the University of Vigo has shown that worms are capable of telling whether another worm is a virgin or not, and triple the volume of sperm transferred during copulation if they detect a fertilisation competition risk.

Think it's tough for humans to find the right mate? Malagasy mouse lemurs are so similar that picking a mate of the right species, especially at night time in a tropical forest, was thought to be more luck than science, but new research has shown that our desperately cute distant cousins use vocalizations to pick up a partner of the right species.

Until recently, grey, golden brown, and Goodman’s mouse lemurs were all thought to be the same species. But genetic testing revealed that they are, in fact, three distinct, species so similar that they cannot be told apart by their appearance—so called cryptic species.

“A fundamental problem for cryptic species that live in the same area and habitat is the coordination of reproduction and discrimination between potential mates of the same species and remarkably similar individuals of other species” say Pia Braune and colleagues from the Institute of Zoology, University of Veterinary Medicine, Hannover University.

It seems rumors of the greater dwarf cloud rat's demise have been greatly exaggerated. Sure, he stayed low key for the last 112 years but he really never left his natural habitat.

Seeing the little guy once and then declaring him extinct was likely premature.

Carpomys melanurus, the greater dwarf cloud rat, has dense, soft reddish-brown fur, a black mask around large dark eyes, small rounded ears, a broad and blunt snout, and a long tail covered with dark hair. An adult weighs about 185 grams.

"This beautiful little animal was seen by biologists only once previously - by a British researcher in 1896 who was given several specimens by local people, so he knew almost nothing about the ecology of the species," said Lawrence Heaney, Curator of Mammals at the Field Museum and Project Leader. "Since then, the species has been a mystery, in part because there is virtually no forest left on Mt. Data, where it was first found."

Using microphone arrays and photographic methods to reconstruct flight paths of bats in the field when they find and capture prey in air using their sonar system, Annemarie Surlykke from the Institute of Biology, SDU, Denmark, and her colleague, Elisabeth Kalko, from the University of Ulm, estimated the emitted sound intensity and found that bats emit exceptionally loud sounds exceeding 140 dB SPL (at 10 cm from the bat's mouth), which is the highest level reported so far for any animal in air.

For comparison, the level at a loud rock concert is 115-120 dB and for humans, the threshold of pain is around 120 dB.(1)

As you might expect, much of the evolution of how lizards move is related to getting food.

A research team led by Ohio University doctoral student Eric McElroy tracked 18 different species of lizards as they walked or ran in order to understand how their foraging styles impact their biomechanics. The study, funded by the National Science Foundation, was featured in the April 1 edition of the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Lizards use two basic foraging techniques. In the first approach, aptly dubbed sit-and-wait, lizards spend most of their time perched in one location waiting for their prey to pass. Then, with a quick burst of speed, they run after their prey, snatching it up with their tongues.

Female mice can steer clear of inbred males on the basis of their scent alone, according to evidence in Current Biology.

The researchers found that female mice chose to associate with males producing a greater diversity of major urinary proteins (MUPs), even when all else was held equal. An earlier study by the same team had shown that wild mice also rely on MUPs to recognize and avoid mating with their close relatives.

Inbreeding is often avoided in animals because it can lead faulty, otherwise hidden (or recessive) traits to surface in their offspring. Nevertheless, Thom said, inbreeding does sometimes occur.

Female fruit flies sometimes choose males who are aggresive, sometimes choose males who do not fight at all, and sometimes choose males for no reason science can explain, write a team of biologists, and the findings help explain the large variation in aggressiveness in most species, including humans.

So females are unpredictable, which means the fittest males don’t always get the girl. This explains why males don't evolve towards super-aggressiveness.

“If aggression makes you more likely to father children, all males should be selected to be very aggressive. Male fruit flies (like humans and other animals) show a lot of genetic variation in aggression, and we wanted to find out why,” explained study leader Brad Foley, a post-doctoral researcher at USC.

Varanus komodoensis, the fearsome Komodo dragon, is the world's largest living lizard and, with 60 razor-sharp serrated teeth, can take on very large animal prey.

A new international study has revealed how it can be such an efficient killing machine despite having a wimpy bite and a featherweight skull - clever engineering.

The Komodo dragon grows to an average length of two to three meters and weighing around 70 kilograms. The reptile's unusual size is attributed to island gigantism, since there are no other carnivorous mammals to fill the niche on the islands where they live. As a result of their size, these lizards are apex predators, dominating the ecosystems in which they live. Although Komodo dragons eat mostly carrion, they will also hunt and ambush prey including invertebrates, birds, and mammals.

Its saliva is frequently blood-tinged, because its teeth are almost completely covered by gingival tissue that is naturally lacerated during feeding. Discovered by Western scientists in 1910, the Komodo dragon’s large size and fearsome reputation makes it a popular zoo exhibit. In the wild its total population is estimated at 4,000-5,000: its range has contracted due to human activities and it is listed as vulnerable by the IUCN.