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Category: Ecology

‘The toll is huge’: El Niño-driven wildfires overwhelm Indonesia’s orangutan population

‘The toll is huge’: El Niño-driven wildfires overwhelm Indonesia’s orangutan population

The Guardian reports: The mother’s hands were peeling from walking on the torched ground. Her eight-month-old baby, which clung to her side, was dehydrated and thin. The pair, named Mama Abu and Abu (“ash” in Indonesian), were found in an oil palm subsidiary estate, rescuers say. The orangutan pair were saved last month from wildfires that are devouring Indonesia’s forests and peatland, unleashing thick smog, and destroying the habitat of some of the planet’s most vulnerable species. Primate specialists from…

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Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Wildfire converted me from a tree-hugger to a tree-worshipper

Robert Moor writes: Thirteen years ago, I traded a shoe-box apartment on the east side of Manhattan for a cabin in the woods on the west coast of Canada. Like so many would-be Thoreauvians before me, I moved here in part because I craved an escape from the city’s pollution and noise. In that time, however, I have begun to feel the city — which is to say, the whole tangled system of advanced technology, industrial agriculture and hypercapitalism —…

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Nietzsche’s startling provocation: You’re edible and delicious

Nietzsche’s startling provocation: You’re edible and delicious

Nicholas E Low writes: It looked like a piece of driftwood floating in muddy floodwaters. But then it grew a pair of eyes that peered above the waterline. As the canoe came closer, the crocodile struck, attempting to topple it. Not knowing what else to do, the woman inside paddled toward a set of trees with branches hanging over the water. When she jumped to grab one, the crocodile leapt, too, pulling her underwater into a death roll. ‘That was…

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Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Popular Science reports: We humans love our pets, but we aren’t the only great apes who buddy up with other species. Researchers have documented multiple instances of primates forming bonds with different animals, but a recent study indicates these relationships may be even more common than expected. In a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review published in the journal Primates, anthropologists at the University of Oxford explored various instances of monkeys and apes carrying, grooming, playing, and sometimes actually adopting other creatures. The…

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Mapping the largely uncharted terrain of the human microbiome

Mapping the largely uncharted terrain of the human microbiome

Jeneen Interlandi writes: In the mid-2010s, when they were still postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin kept bumping into different sides of the same obstacle. Poyet, an ecologist and a microbiologist, was trying to study rare bacterial species, the kind that had never been grown in a lab before. Groussin, a computational biologist in the same lab, wanted to understand how humans and microbes evolved together over millenniums. Each was focused on microbes…

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The U.S. just approved a giant space mirror to test ‘sunlight on demand.’ Low Earth orbit is getting weird

The U.S. just approved a giant space mirror to test ‘sunlight on demand.’ Low Earth orbit is getting weird

Reflect Orbital’s plans to have more than 50,000 satellites reflecting sunlight back to earth could disrupt the circadian rhythms of plants, animals and humans. (Unsplash/Mariana Proença) By Samantha Lawler, University of Regina and Aaron Boley, University of British Columbia A giant mirror to create “sunlight on demand” was just approved by the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite opposition from astronomers and the public, and real safety concerns. The FCC approved the company Reflect Orbital to test one satellite,…

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Trump cuts habitat protections for endangered species

Trump cuts habitat protections for endangered species

The New York Times reports: The Trump administration on Friday moved to open the habitats of imperiled animals to farming, drilling, mining, real estate development and other activities in what environmentalists characterized as the most severe erosion of protections for wildlife in half a century. It did so by recasting a single word, “harm.” For more than 50 years, the federal government has used a broader definition of harm to animals under the Endangered Species Act, a bedrock environmental law….

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It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

It doesn’t have to be humanity versus nature

Yadvinder Malhi writes: For much of the modern era, the global narrative of economic development has been imagined as a human story unfolding against a backdrop of nature as an externality to be exploited. Forests, rivers, soils and species appear as resources to be managed, inputs to be optimised, or constraints to be overcome. Human wellbeing advances; nature reduces. In some ways, this narrative has delivered. The condition and welfare of billions of humans have been improved beyond recognition. Yet…

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Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Science reports: From half-meter-long moths to fairy wasps smaller than sand grains, insects come in a stunning variety of shapes and sizes and constitute the most diverse animal group on Earth. But the insect species discovered so far may represent just a fraction of the total crawling, flying, and burrowing around the planet, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using statistical methods borrowed from another field, a team of entomologists…

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A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

A vast meshwork of soil-bound fungi governs life aboveground

Max G. Levy writes: One Tuesday in June 2025, a white Chevy Suburban set off down the northernmost highway in North America. The sun of Alaska’s polar summer hadn’t set in 40 days, and it wouldn’t set again for another 35. But for Michael Van Nuland, the biologist in the driver’s seat, time was already running out. The SUV, packed with four days of fieldwork essentials — rubber boots for mucking in marshes, GPS for centimeter-level precision, a steel tube…

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Mass drowning of chicks puts emperor penguins at risk of extinction

Mass drowning of chicks puts emperor penguins at risk of extinction

The Guardian reports: The mass drowning of emperor penguin chicks as sea ice is melted by the climate crisis has led the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) to declare the species officially in danger of extinction. Emperor penguins rely on “fast” ice – sea ice that is firmly attached to the coast – for nine months of the year. It is where their fluffy chicks are hatched and grow until they have their waterproof feathers. Adults moult every…

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Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Nature’s ‘engine is grinding to a halt’ as climate change gains pace, says study

Phys.org reports: Many ecologists hypothesize that, as global warming accelerates, change in nature must speed up. They assume that as temperatures rise and climatic zones shift, species will face local extinction and colonize new habitats at an ever-increasing rate, leading to a rapid reshuffling of ecological communities. A new study by researchers at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and published in Nature Communications shows this is emphatically not the case. The researchers analyzed a massive database of biodiversity surveys,…

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The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

The Amazon is shifting into a ‘hypertropical’ state unseen for millions of years

Science Alert reports: A new study of the Amazon rainforest has found the region is shifting toward a ‘hypertropical’ state as droughts become longer, hotter, and more frequent. These conditions have “no current analogue” according to the international team of researchers behind the study. Trees are becoming exposed to whole new levels of stress, and the Amazon’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide is being reduced, too. So drastic are the contemporary and impending changes, based on data gathered across the…

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Nature can bounce back if we just give it a chance

Nature can bounce back if we just give it a chance

Emma Marris writes: When the last of four dams on the Klamath River in southern Oregon and Northern California was demolished in October 2024, everyone who knew the river well had a question: How long would it take for salmon to reclaim the upper reaches they’d been cut off from for more than 100 years? About 10 months later, when they began their fall migration, Chinook salmon immediately took advantage of their new river access, looking for places upstream to…

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How humanity has broken a cycle that sustains life on Earth

How humanity has broken a cycle that sustains life on Earth

Jack Lohmann writes: Stored in rock and organic material, phosphorus cycles slowly around Earth, through magma and mountains, down rivers, through waste and into oceans. Without it, there’d be no life – every living being needs it to grow. Unlike other mined materials, we all eat it. In the human body, it gives our cells energy, structure and identity, and it is particularly concentrated in our bones. Rare enough to be notable, common enough to be necessary, phosphorus tracks the…

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