Kerry Howley writes: It remains a matter of dispute when and where and with what antecedent Melanie During came up with the idea for determining the season the asteroid killed the dinosaurs. But the idea was this: Sturgeon bones grow like tree rings, and the bone cells grow thickest in summer, when food is most plentiful. A slice of bone, then, should reveal a succession of seasons. Months of plenty would be thicker, as the fish grew fat on plankton….
Stella Sandford writes: It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals and humans interesting, such as agency, intelligence, cognition, intention, consciousness, decision-making, self-identification, sociality and altruism. However, groundbreaking developments in the plant sciences since the end of the previous century have blown that view…
BBC News reports: Once upon a time, the vulture was an abundant and ubiquitous bird in India. The scavenging birds hovered over sprawling landfills, looking for cattle carcasses. Sometimes they would alarm pilots by getting sucked into jet engines during airport take-offs. But more than two decades ago, India’s vultures began dying because of a drug used to treat sick cows. By the mid-1990s, the 50 million-strong vulture population had plummeted to near zero because of diclofenac, a cheap non-steroidal…
Rolling Stone reports: Leonard Leo, best known as the architect of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, is fueling an assault on efforts to preserve the environment and the planet. His dark money network has also been funding campaigns to dismantle the Endangered Species Act (ESA) — 50 years after it was established to protect plant and animal species at risk of extinction. Since its passing, the ESA has been credited for saving 99 percent of its listed wildlife including bald…
The Guardian reports: Protecting just 1.2% of the Earth’s surface for nature would be enough to prevent the extinction of the world’s most threatened species, according to a new study. Analysis published in the journal Frontiers in Science has found that the targeted expansion of protected areas on land would be enough to prevent the loss of thousands of the mammals, birds, amphibians and plants that are closest to disappearing. From Argentina to Papua New Guinea, the team of researchers…
Anders Gyllenhaal and Beverly Gyllenhaal write: For weeks, Adam Smith had been crunching the raw data from more bird statistics than anyone had ever tried before—thirteen different bird counts and millions of radar sweeps. Suddenly he heard the musical chime that tells him his results are ready. He leaned across his desk, surrounded by enough high-powered computers to heat up his entire office, and stared at what could only be an impossible conclusion: Over the past fifty years, his calculations…
GrrlScientist writes: What’s the scariest animal on the planet? Some people claim lions are. Or tigers. Or maybe wolves. Others might say sharks. But, as we learned from a recent question that went viral online, there are a lot of women out here who say that men are the most fearsome of animals — more terrifying even than meeting a bear when alone in the woods. And they are far from alone in this assessment, it appears. A recent study…
A goat with an arrow wound nibbles the medicinal herb dittany. O. Dapper, CC BY By Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him. The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered…
Lesley Evans Ogden writes: Anne Salomon’s first week as a graduate student in 2001 was not what she had anticipated. While other new students headed to introductory lectures, Salomon was whisked away by van and then motorboat to Tatoosh Island, which sits just offshore of the northwestern tip of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Among the tide pools of this isolated island, Salomon peered at the web of life on the rocks: ochre sea stars, barnacles, mussels, snails and assorted algae that…
Anthropocene reports: When the COVID-19 pandemic struck the world in 2020, it drew attention to the ways environmental damage can set the stage for disease outbreaks. Scientists pointed to the potential roles of urbanization, habitat loss, and trade in live animals for helping to fuel a disease that many scientists think leapt from wild animals to people. While all those factors might have influenced this particular pandemic, they aren’t the main ways that environmental destruction threatens to amplify infectious disease….
Seagrass meadows are a hugely important store of blue carbon – and so is the rest of the ocean sea floor. Philip Schubert/Shutterstock By William Austin, University of St Andrews “The science we need for the ocean we want” – this is the tagline for the UN Ocean Decade (2021-2030), which has just held its first conference in Barcelona, Spain. Marine scientists from around the world, including me, gathered alongside global leaders to chart the progress of this ten-year mission…
GrrlScientist writes: Located in southeastern portion of Africa in the nations of Malawi and Mozambique, there lies a chain of mountains, or granitic inselbergs, that tower above the surrounding landscape. They were formed millions of years ago when the Earth’s crust pushed upward and torrential rainfall cut through and washed away the soil, leaving patches of forest perched atop granite mountain peaks, separated from lower elevations. These inselbergs comprise an “inland archipelago” or “sky islands”, if you prefer, that are…
Lina Zeldovich writes: When foraging for flowers, bees search for the familiar scents that blooms puff out into the air to attract them. Scientists call these little fragrant air pockets “odor plumes.” Once bees detect an odor plume, they start following it, flying from side to side to navigate to wherever the odor is strongest—scientists call this “casting”—until they land on a flower. “If you think of a flower, it’s basically acting as a message beacon,” says Ben Langford, an…
John Whitfield writes: It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive. In the new…
The Guardian reports: Misguided tree-planting projects are threatening crucial ecosystems across Africa, scientists have warned. Research has revealed that an area the size of France is threatened by forest restoration initiatives that are taking place in inappropriate landscapes. One project in particular, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative, aims to plant trees across 100m hectares (247m acres) of land by 2030. Scientists have warned that the scheme plans to plant trees in non-forest ecosystems such as savannahs and grasslands, potentially…
Inside Climate News reports: Humans are driving migratory animals—sea turtles, chimpanzees, lions and penguins, among dozens of other species—towards extinction, according to the most comprehensive assessment of migratory species ever carried out. The State of the World’s Migratory Species, a first of its kind report compiled by conservation scientists under the auspices of the U.N. Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre, found population decline, a precursor to extinction, in nearly half of the roughly 1,200 species listed under the Convention…