Download full-text PDF |
Source |
---|---|
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/545032a | DOI Listing |
Geroscience
September 2024
Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary, 2500 University Dr NW, Calgary, AB, T2N 4N1, Canada.
Sensory systems mediate our social interactions, food intake, livelihoods, and other essential daily functions. Age-related decline and disease in sensory systems pose a significant challenge to healthy aging. Research on sensory decline in humans is informative but can often be difficult, subject to sampling bias, and influenced by environmental variation.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFScience
September 2024
Department of Biology, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA.
The brown rat () occupies nearly every terrestrial habitat with a human presence and is one of our most important model organisms. Despite this prevalence, gaps remain in understanding the evolution of brown rat commensalism, their global dispersal, and mechanisms underlying contemporary adaptations to diverse environments. In this Review, we explore recent advances in the evolutionary history of brown rats and discuss key challenges, including finding and accurately dating historical specimens, disentangling histories of multiple domestication events, and synthesizing functional variation in wild rat populations with the development of laboratory strains.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSci Adv
April 2024
Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, School of Natural Sciences, The University of Manchester, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, UK.
While the impacts of black () and brown () rats on human society are well documented-including the spread of disease, broad-scale environmental destruction, and billions spent annually on animal control-little is known about their ecology and behavior in urban areas due to the challenges of studying animals in city environments. We use isotopic and ZooMS analysis of archaeological (1550s-1900 CE) rat remains from eastern North America to provide a large-scale framework for species arrival, interspecific competition, and dietary ecology. Brown rats arrived earlier than expected and rapidly outcompeted black rats in coastal urban areas.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Commun
May 2022
BioArCh, Department of Archaeology, University of York, York, YO1 7EP, UK.
The distribution of the black rat (Rattus rattus) has been heavily influenced by its association with humans. The dispersal history of this non-native commensal rodent across Europe, however, remains poorly understood, and different introductions may have occurred during the Roman and medieval periods. Here, in order to reconstruct the population history of European black rats, we first generate a de novo genome assembly of the black rat.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFZootaxa
November 2021
Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London, London NW1 4RY, UK. .
Enter search terms and have AI summaries delivered each week - change queries or unsubscribe any time!