Dissonant Music Brings out the Animal in Us

Research by Daniel Blumstein, professor and chair of the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, and Greg Bryant, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies, has shown that distorted and jarring music tends to excite listeners because it mimics the distress calls of animals.

Multiple Causes of Woolly Mammoth Extinction

A study by Glen MacDonald, director of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and a professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) along with Robert Wayne and Blaire Van Valkenburgh, also EEB professors, found that woolly mammoths succumbed to a lethal combination of climate warming, encroaching humans and habitat change between 4,000 and 10,000 years ago.

UCLA life scientists view biodiversity through a whole new dimension

Van Savage, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Assistant Professor, Samraat Pawar, a post-doctoral scholar in Savage’s group, and their collaborators have demonstrated for the first time that the relationship between animals’ body size and their feeding rate — the overall amount of food they consume per unit of time — is largely determined by the properties of the space in which they search for their food.

Hacking Code of Leaf Vein Architecture Solves Mysteries, Allows Predictions of Past Climate

Lawren Sack, professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, along with graduate student Christine Scoffoni, three UCLA undergraduate researchers, and colleagues have discovered new laws that determine the construction of leaf vein systems as leaves grow and evolve. The research, has a range of fundamental implications for global ecology and allows researchers to estimate original leaf sizes from just a fragment of a leaf. W improve scientists’ prediction and interpretation of climate in the deep past from leaf fossils.