Rare Sighting Of Bobcat In The Bronx River, A Sign Of A Healthier Waterway
arrow A bobcat roams around an undisclosed section of the Bronx River. Photo captured on October 2020 by grad students who didn t learn about it until this month. Dr. Bobby Habig
Ecologists captured a rare sighting of a bobcat roaming around the Bronx River recently, offering yet another sign that the waterway has made quite the comeback in recent years.
Queens College students Angelinna Bradfield and Ritika Nath, engaged in a 15-month research project studying mammal diversity in the Bronx River and just learned about the sighting this month. This happened after one of the students changed the SD card in one of the trail cameras in the park set up as part of the project.
Credit: Image courtesy of C. Albano
Tropical regions contain many of the world s species and scientists consider them hotspots due to their immense biological diversity. However, due to limited sampling our knowledge of tropical diversity remains incomplete, making it difficult for researchers to answer the fundamental questions of the mechanisms that drive and maintain diversity.
In a paper published December 10 in
Science, an international team of scientists has produced the first complete, species-level phylogeny of a major group of tropical birds known as the suboscine passerines. Passerines are the largest order of birds and among the most diverse orders of terrestrial vertebrates. The suboscine group includes more than 1,306 species and in the Neotropics they make up roughly one-third of the total avian population.