Department of Biology

A DNA-based technique developed by UW researcher Sam Wasser, helps researchers fight illegal poaching of African elephants.

When a foot injury sidelined dancer Anna Zemke (BA, Dance, Biochemistry), she gave up one dream to pursue another. But she never lost her passion for dance, even as she pursued a second degree in biochemistry.

Passing through bird guts increases chili seed survival 370 percent according to Evan Fricke, a UW doctoral student in biology and lead author of a paper appearing online June 21 in Ecology Letters.

UW Biologist Sam Wasser and his team at the Center for Conservation Biology innovated techniques for extracting and analyzing DNA from ivory.

UW Biologist Sam Wasser's Center for Conservation Biology and Conservation Canines program has rewritten the book on extracting information from animal feces. They get DNA identifying individual animals, gender, eating habits and important stress levels.

Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs taking hold in Tanzania and Zambia in the mid-Triassic period, many millions of years before dinosaur relatives were seen in the fossil record elsewhere on Earth.

Super-slow motion footage of a moth in flight has revealed how the insects use their bodies to hover. The UW researchers who carried out this study are examining insect flight in order to "distill the biological principles of flight control."

A substance implicated in several mass extinctions could greatly enhance plant growth, with implications for global food supplies and biofuels, new UW research shows.

Professors Tom Daniel (Biology) and Yomi Braester (Comparative Literature) are among a prestigious group of 2013 Guggenheim Fellowship recipients.

Estella Leopold, biology professor emeritus, is co-author of a recently released book "Saved in Time: The Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado." The book chronicles one of the nation's first explicitly environmental legal cases in which Leopold was a key player.

At high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide--levels in line with expected concentrations over the next century--a blue mussel's byssal threads become weaker, less able to stretch and less able to attach to rocks, found scientists Emily Carrington, Michael O'Donnell and Matthew George of the University of Washington.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of wild Fauna and Flora added 343 species of plants and animals to its endangered species lists at a recent conference. Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology, is quoted.

A University of Washington research team has captured color photographs of what could be a previously undocumented species of chambered nautilus, a cephalopod mollusk often classified as a "living fossil," in the waters off American Samoa in the South Pacific.

New research led by the University of Washington challenges the 140-year-old assumption that prehistoric mammals such as horses, rhinos and gazelles lived in grasslands.

UW biologist Sam Wasser pushes for more forensic testing of seized ivory to help track down poachers, slow elephant slaughter.