Understanding biological relationships is often critical when studying animal populations. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig University, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research and the Freie Universität Berlin have now developed a transformative approach that identifies stretches of DNA that two individuals inherited from a common ancestor. The team successfully applied their new tool to a free-ranging population of rhesus macaques. The results show that even for low-quality sequencing data, this method can accurately determine relatedness among pairs of individuals, even without prior knowledge of pedigrees within the population. This breakthrough helps to reveal previously unknown pairs of relatives and provides rich insights into population structure in the wild.

New research from the University of Chicago revealed that the nervous system circuitry that controls arm movement in octopuses is segmented, giving these extraordinary creatures precise control across all eight arms and hundreds of suckers to explore their environment, grasp objects, and capture prey.