Browsed by
Category: Ecology

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

Ocean treaty: Historic agreement reached after decade of talks

BBC News reports: Nations have reached a historic agreement to protect the world’s oceans following 10 years of negotiations. The High Seas Treaty aims to place 30% of the seas into protected areas by 2030, to safeguard and recuperate marine nature. The agreement was reached on Saturday evening, after 38 hours of talks, at UN headquarters in New York. The negotiations had been held up for years over disagreements on funding and fishing rights. The last international agreement on ocean…

Read More Read More

Climate impacts have made human-wildlife conflicts a global problem

Climate impacts have made human-wildlife conflicts a global problem

Inside Climate News reports: Climate change is driving more conflicts between humans and wildlife, as expanding development, deepening drought and quickly changing ecosystems force animals and people into new territories where they’re more likely to encounter each other, a new study says. Experts have long called for a concerted effort to address these human-wildlife clashes, which can lead to property damage, as well as injuries and death for both humans and animals. In fact, human-wildlife conflicts are already the leading…

Read More Read More

Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year as light pollution erases stars for everyone

Night skies are getting 9.6% brighter every year as light pollution erases stars for everyone

All human development, from large cities to small towns, shines light into the night sky. Benny Ang/Flickr, CC BY By Chris Impey, University of Arizona and Connie Walker, National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory CC BY-ND For most of human history, the stars blazed in an otherwise dark night sky. But starting around the Industrial Revolution, as artificial light increasingly lit cities and towns at night, the stars began to disappear. We are two astronomers who depend on dark night skies…

Read More Read More

Biophobia hurts nature and humans

Biophobia hurts nature and humans

Emily Harwitz writes: When Masashi Soga was growing up in Japan, he loved spending time outside catching insects and collecting plants. His parents weren’t big fans of the outdoors, but he had an elementary schoolteacher who was. “They taught me how to collect butterflies, how to make a specimen of butterflies,” Soga recalls. “I enjoyed nature quite a lot.” That early exposure helped foster Soga’s appreciation for nature, he says, and today, Soga is an ecologist at the University of…

Read More Read More

Ukraine counts war’s cost for nature

Ukraine counts war’s cost for nature

The Guardian reports: Toxic smoke, contaminated rivers, poisoned soil, trees reduced to charred stumps, nature reserves pocked with craters: the environmental toll from Russia’s war with Ukraine, which has been detailed in a new map, might once have been considered incalculable. But extensive investigations by Ukrainian scientists, conservationists, bureaucrats and lawyers are now under way to ensure this is the first conflict in which a full reckoning is made of environmental crimes so the aggressor can be held to account…

Read More Read More

Ants aren’t adapting to warmer temperatures

Ants aren’t adapting to warmer temperatures

Eos reports: Ants are a bedrock of forest ecosystems, and they might not be adjusting well to warming temperatures. In newly published research, scientists found that foraging ants preferred to gather food placed at specific temperatures but did not avoid food that was too hot or too cold. Long-term exposure to these hot, but sublethal, temperatures could be changing the ants’ food and energy usage, harming colonies and broader forest ecosystems. Hotter temperatures force ants to use more energy to…

Read More Read More

Some ‘friendly’ bacteria backstab their algal pals. Now we know why

Some ‘friendly’ bacteria backstab their algal pals. Now we know why

Science News reports: The photosynthesizing plankton Emiliania huxleyi has a dramatic relationship with its bacterial frenemies. These duplicitous bugs help E. huxleyi in exchange for nutrients until it becomes more convenient to murder and eat their hosts. Now, scientists have figured out how these treacherous bacteria decide to turn from friend to foe. One species of these bacteria appears to keep tabs on health-related chemicals produced by E. huxleyi, researchers report January 24 in eLife. The bacteria maintain their friendly…

Read More Read More

Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Protecting endangered species necessitates protecting threatened cultures

Science News reports: In shallow coastal waters of the Indian and Pacific oceans, a seagrass-scrounging cousin of the manatee is in trouble. Environmental strains like pollution and habitat loss pose a major threat to dugong (Dugong dugon) survival, so much so that in December, the International Union for Conservation of Nature upgraded the species’ extinction risk status to vulnerable. Some populations are now classified as endangered or critically endangered. If that weren’t bad enough, the sea cows are at risk…

Read More Read More

Native seed banks in the U.S. have insufficient supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change

Native seed banks in the U.S. have insufficient supplies to mitigate the effects of climate change

NPR reports: In the wake of wildfires, floods and droughts, restoring damaged landscapes and habitats requires native seeds. The U.S. doesn’t have enough, according to a report released Thursday. “Time is of the essence to bank the seeds and the genetic diversity our lands hold,” the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) report said. As climate change worsens extreme weather events, the damage left behind by those events will become more severe. That, in turn, will create greater…

Read More Read More

Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Elephants, the gardeners of Africa’s rainforests, play a vital role in promoting carbon retention

Anthropocene magazine reports: Elephants been called a lot of things: the world’s largest land creatures, imperiled, majestic, charismatic. Now scientists have a few more terms for describing them: foresters and climate champions. In the jungles of equatorial Africa, scientists report that forest elephants play an important role in shaping the forest around them as they vacuum up as much as 200 kilograms worth of plants every day. Their appetites influence not just what trees survive but how much carbon the…

Read More Read More

How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

How gut bacteria are controlling your brain

Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren write: Your gut is a bustling and thriving alien colony. They number in their trillions and include thousands of different species. Many of these microorganisms, including bacteria, archaea and eukarya, were here long before humans, have evolved alongside us and now outnumber our own cells many times over. Indeed, as John Cryan, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at University College Cork, rather strikingly put it in a TEDx talk: “When you go to the…

Read More Read More

Why we will never be able to live on another planet

Why we will never be able to live on another planet

Arwen E Nicholson and Raphaëlle D Haywood write: For decades, children have grown up with the daring movie adventures of intergalactic explorers and the untold habitable worlds they find. Many of the highest-grossing films are set on fictional planets, with paid advisors keeping the science ‘realistic’. At the same time, narratives of humans trying to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth have also become mainstream. Given all our technological advances, it’s tempting to believe we are approaching an age of interplanetary…

Read More Read More

Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

Human noise drowns out communication between dolphins

The New York Times reports: Mammals in the ocean swim through a world of sound. But in recent decades, humans have been cranking up the volume, blasting waters with noise from shipping, oil and gas exploration and military operations. New research suggests that such anthropogenic noise may make it harder for dolphins to communicate and work together. When dolphins cooperated on a task in a noisy environment, the animals were not so different from city dwellers on land trying to…

Read More Read More

The vanishing wild: Life on Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction, scientists say

The vanishing wild: Life on Earth in midst of sixth mass extinction, scientists say

  60 Minutes reports: In what year will the human population grow too large for the Earth to sustain? The answer is about 1970, according to research by the World Wildlife Fund. In 1970, the planet’s 3 and a half billion people were sustainable. But on this New Year’s Day, the population is 8 billion. Today, wild plants and animals are running out of places to live. The scientists you’re about to meet say the Earth is suffering a crisis…

Read More Read More

Nearly 200 countries approve a biodiversity accord enshrining human rights and the ‘rights of nature’

Nearly 200 countries approve a biodiversity accord enshrining human rights and the ‘rights of nature’

Inside Climate News reports: Nearly 200 countries have signed off on an agreement that embeds the promotion of human rights and the “rights of nature” into a plan to protect and restore biodiversity through 2030. The 14-page document, while nonbinding, was adopted on Dec. 19, 2022 at COP15, a 12-day conference convened in Montreal under the auspices of the U.N. Convention of Biological Diversity. It is the first international agreement to give credence to a growing movement that recognizes that…

Read More Read More

An ancient partnership has helped both plants and fungi thrive over much of Earth

An ancient partnership has helped both plants and fungi thrive over much of Earth

Science reports: As a motley medley of mycologists climbed the basalt slopes of the Lanín volcano earlier this year, the green foliage at lower elevations gave way to autumnal golds and reds. Chile’s famed Araucaria—commonly called monkey puzzle trees—soon appeared, their spiny branches curving jauntily upward like so many cats’ tails. Beneath the majestic trees, the scientists were focused on something far less glamorous—indeed, mostly invisible: mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of the Araucaria and nearly all…

Read More Read More