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Category: Ecology

How synchronous firefly flashes illuminate the physics of complex systems

How synchronous firefly flashes illuminate the physics of complex systems

Orit Peleg writes: In the still of the Tennessee night, my colleagues and I are watching thousands of dim little orbs of light, moving peacefully in the forest around us. We try to guess where the next flash will appear, but the movements seem erratic, even ephemeral. This summer, as we set up our cameras and tents, I feel a crippling sense of dread. I had brought us all up here to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, an unlikely…

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The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

The complexity of the biodiversity crisis

Nature reports: Scientists say it’s clear that there’s a biodiversity crisis, but there are many questions about the details. Which species will lose? Will new communities be healthy and desirable? Will the rapidly changing ecosystems be able to deal with climate change? And where should conservation actions be targeted? To find answers, scientists need better data from field sites around the world, collected at regular intervals over long periods of time. Such data don’t exist for much of the world,…

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Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

Video shows salmon injured by unlivable water temperatures after heatwave

  The Guardian reports: Salmon in the Columbia River were exposed to unlivable water temperatures that caused them to break out in angry red lesions and white fungus in the wake of the Pacific north-west’s record-shattering heatwave, according to a conservation group that has documented the disturbing sight. In a video released on Tuesday by the non-profit organization Columbia Riverkeeper, a group of sockeye salmon swimming in a tributary of the river can be seen covered in injuries the group…

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It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

It’s time to retire the hierarchical classification of living things

Peter Wohlleben writes: In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der Welt (published in English as The Life of Plants). I was happy to say yes. The German title of Coccia’s book translates as “The Roots of the World,” and the book really does cover this. It upends our view of the living world, putting plants…

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In the West, baby hawks, too young to fly, are leaping from their nests to escape the extreme heat

In the West, baby hawks, too young to fly, are leaping from their nests to escape the extreme heat

The Washington Post reports: One wildlife rehabilitation center in rural Oregon says it got “three months’ worth of birds” in three days. Another, in northern California, declared a “hawkpocalypse” in June. And earlier in the summer, Portland Audubon, a nonprofit environmental organization, took in more than 100 Cooper’s hawks over four days as temperatures soared to record highs in the 110s. Normally they might get a dozen in a year. Around the West, young birds of prey have been jumping…

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Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

Like in ‘postapocalyptic movies’: Heat wave killed marine wildlife en masse

The New York Times reports: Dead mussels and clams coated rocks in the Pacific Northwest, their shells gaping open as if they’d been boiled. Sea stars were baked to death. Sockeye salmon swam sluggishly in an overheated Washington river, prompting wildlife officials to truck them to cooler areas. The combination of extraordinary heat and drought that hit the Western United States and Canada over the past two weeks has killed hundreds of millions of marine animals and continues to threaten…

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Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Heatwaves and drought are killing trees at an alarming rate

Juniper trees, common in Arizona’s Prescott National Forest, have been dying with the drought. Benjamin Roe/USDA Forest Service via AP By Daniel Johnson, University of Georgia and Raquel Partelli Feltrin, University of British Columbia Like humans, trees need water to survive on hot, dry days, and they can survive for only short times under extreme heat and dry conditions. During prolonged droughts and extreme heat waves like the Western U.S. is experiencing, even native trees that are accustomed to the…

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African great apes to suffer massive range loss in next 30 years

African great apes to suffer massive range loss in next 30 years

Science Daily reports: A new study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions predicts massive range declines of Africa’s great apes — gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos — due to the impacts of climate change, land-use changes and human population growth. For their analysis, the authors compiled information on African ape occurrence held in the IUCN SSC A.P.E.S. database, a repository that includes a remarkable amount of information on population status, threats and conservation for several hundred sites, collected over 20…

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Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Pesticides are killing the world’s soils

Nathan Donley and Tari Gunstone write: Scoop up a shovelful of healthy soil, and you’ll likely be holding more living organisms than there are people on the planet Earth. Like citizens of an underground city that never sleeps, tens of thousands of subterranean species of invertebrates, nematodes, bacteria and fungi are constantly filtering our water, recycling nutrients and helping to regulate the earth’s temperature. But beneath fields covered in tightly knit rows of corn, soybeans, wheat and other monoculture crops,…

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Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Microbes are a missing piece in the biodiversity puzzle

Ian Morse writes: Scientists are clear: the number of plant and animal species on Earth is declining. The climate crisis, habitat loss, pollution and the illegal wildlife trade are all pushing species toward extinction. Researchers especially worry that losing too much biodiversity could push the earth past a tipping point into irreversible change, and on into a new paradigm in which humanity and other life can’t survive. Which partly explains humanity’s self-interest and urgency in understanding and maintaining global biodiversity….

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At any one time, 20,000 Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth, calculation determines

At any one time, 20,000 Tyrannosaurus rex roamed the Earth, calculation determines

Nature reports: Ever wondered how many Tyrannosaurus rex ever roamed the Earth? The answer is 2.5 billion over the two million or so years for which the species existed, according to a calculation published today in Science1. The figure has allowed researchers to estimate just how exceedingly rare it is for animals to fossilize. Palaeontologists led by Charles Marshall at the University of California, Berkeley, used a method employed by ecologists studying contemporary creatures to estimate the population density of…

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Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

Just 3% of the world’s ecosystems remain intact, study suggests

The Guardian reports: Just 3% of the world’s land remains ecologically intact with healthy populations of all its original animals and undisturbed habitat, a study suggests. These fragments of wilderness undamaged by human activities are mainly in parts of the Amazon and Congo tropical forests, east Siberian and northern Canadian forests and tundra, and the Sahara. Invasive alien species including cats, foxes, rabbits, goats and camels have had a major impact on native species in Australia, with the study finding…

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America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

America’s corn belt has lost a third of its topsoil

Becca Dzombak reports: Seth Watkins has been farming his family’s land in southern Iowa for decades, growing pasture for his cows as well as corn and other row crops. His great-grandfather founded the farm in 1848. “He came in with one of John Deere’s steel plows and pierced the prairie,” Watkins recounted. With its rolling hills and neat lines of corn stretching to the horizon, broken by clumps of trees, it’s a picturesque scene. But centuries of farming those hills…

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The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

The nature you see in documentaries is beautiful and false

Emma Marris writes: It’s late afternoon, late pandemic, and I’m watching a new nature documentary in bed, after taking the daintiest of hits from a weed pen. The show is called A Perfect Planet, and it is narrated by Sir David Attenborough. I am looking at the red eye of a flamingo, a molten lake surrounding a tiny black pupil. Now I am looking at drone footage of a massive colony of flamingos, the classic sweeping overhead shot, what my…

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Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

Africa’s forest elephants are just a step from extinction

The New York Times reports: While some African elephants parade across the savanna and thrill tourists on safari, others are more discreet. They stay hidden in the forests, eating fruit. “You feel pretty lucky when you catch sight of them,” said Kathleen Gobush, a Seattle-based conservation biologist and member of the African Elephant Specialist Group within the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or I.U.C.N. The threat of extinction has diminished the odds of spotting one of these wood-dwelling elephants…

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The Amazon rainforest could die in your lifetime — here’s why

The Amazon rainforest could die in your lifetime — here’s why

Anna Funk writes: Deforestation in the Amazon has long been the poster child of man-made environmental destruction. But recent trends reveal that the changing climate will likely come for this beloved rainforest long before the last tree is cut down. One researcher has even put a date on his prediction for the Amazon’s impending death: 2064. That’s the year the Amazon rainforest will be completely wiped out. Dramatic? Yes. “I’m a doom-sayer,” admits Robert Walker, a quantitative geographer at the…

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