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Category: Ecology

As a climate change-induced drought wears on, wildlife, livestock and people face deadly consequences

As a climate change-induced drought wears on, wildlife, livestock and people face deadly consequences

Georgina Gustin writes: A wildebeest has toppled into a ditch at the edge of a dusty track, its shoe-box-shaped head twisted upward, a single gaping chomp out of its flank. Isack Marembe and Kisham Makui study the animal’s body and everything around it, doing a roadside postmortem. “A hyena,” Marembe says. But the culprit wasn’t a hyena. The hyena just happened to pass by and take a bite from the dead wildebeest’s side. The killer was—it is—an enduring drought driven…

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Microorganisms that expand their range by absorbing organelles

Microorganisms that expand their range by absorbing organelles

Veronique Greenwood writes: Nature, red in tooth and claw, is rife with organisms that eat their neighbors to get ahead. But in the systems studied by the theoretical ecologist Holly Moeller, an assistant professor of ecology, evolution and marine biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the consumed become part of the consumer in surprising ways. Moeller primarily studies protists, a broad category of unicellular microorganisms like amoebas and paramecia that don’t fit within the familiar macroscopic categories of…

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Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help

Jason Hickel et al, write: The global economy is structured around growth — the idea that firms, industries and nations must increase production every year, regardless of whether it is needed. This dynamic is driving climate change and ecological breakdown. High-income economies, and the corporations and wealthy classes that dominate them, are mainly responsible for this problem and consume energy and materials at unsustainable rates. Yet many industrialized countries are now struggling to grow their economies, given economic convulsions caused…

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British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

British place names resonate with the song of missing birds

Michael J Warren writes: In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the…

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Preventing the collapse of biodiversity, demands the development of a new planetary politics

Preventing the collapse of biodiversity, demands the development of a new planetary politics

Stewart Patrick writes: The planet is in the midst of an environmental emergency, and the world is only tinkering at the margins. Humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels and voracious appetite for natural resources are accelerating climate change and degrading ecosystems on land and sea, threatening the integrity of the biosphere and thus the survival of our own species. Given these risks, it is shocking that the multilateral system has failed to respond more forcefully. Belatedly, the United States, the EU,…

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If we are entering the sixth mass extinction, we are facing our own demise

If we are entering the sixth mass extinction, we are facing our own demise

Patrick Hughes writes: Five times in our planet’s history, adverse conditions have extinguished most of life. Now, scientists say, life on Earth could be in trouble again, with some even saying we could be entering a sixth mass extinction. No credible scientist disputes that we are in a crisis regarding the speed at which nature is being destroyed. But could we really be on track to lose most life on Earth? Human-caused climate change, changes in land use and pollution…

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The 30 percent goal: Is bigger always better for biodiversity?

The 30 percent goal: Is bigger always better for biodiversity?

Fred Pearce writes: In 2009, the U.S. government turned more than 190,000 square miles of pristine ocean centered on the Mariana Trench in the remote Pacific into one of the world’s largest protected areas. The same year, Mexico completed a management plan for the Cabo Pulmo coral reef in the Gulf of California, covering just 27 square miles. Which action achieved the most? As the biggest United Nations conference on biodiversity in a decade gathers in Montreal this week, it…

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Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Protecting 30% of Earth’s surface for nature means thinking about connections near and far

Red knots stop to feed along the Delaware shore as they migrate from the high Arctic to South America. Gregory Breese, USFWS/Flickr By Veronica Frans, Michigan State University and Jianguo “Jack” Liu, Michigan State University A biodiversity crisis is reducing the variety of life on Earth. Under pressure from land and water pollution, development, overhunting, poaching, climate change and species invasions, approximately 1 million plant and animal species are at risk of extinction. One ambitious proposal for stemming these losses…

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Honeybees are living half as long as they were 50 years ago

Honeybees are living half as long as they were 50 years ago

New Scientist reports: Honeybees kept under laboratory conditions in the US only live half as long as they did in the 1970s, suggesting that genetics could be contributing to colony losses, and not just environmental factors such as pesticides and sources of food. Five decades ago, the median lifespan for a worker western honeybee (Apis mellifera) that spent its adult life in a controlled environment was 34.3 days. Now, the median is 17.7 days, according to research by Anthony Nearman…

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Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

Parasite gives wolves what it takes to be pack leaders

Nature reports: Wolves infected with a common parasite are more likely than uninfected animals to lead a pack, according to an analysis of more than 200 North American wolves1. Infected animals are also more likely to leave their home packs and strike out on their own. The parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, makes its hosts bold — a mechanism that increases its survival. To reproduce sexually, T. gondii must reach the body of a cat, usually when its host is eaten by…

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The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The chaotic effects of climate change on Pacific walruses

The New Yorker: In 2018, in the Siberian Arctic, the filmmakers Evgenia Arbugaeva and Maxim Arbugaev, who are sister and brother, arrived on a strange beach. “The sand was of dark colour, full of bones, and smelled terrible,” Arbugaeva recalled. Arbugaeva was working on a photography project about an Indigenous Chukchi community that practices subsistence hunting (whales, walruses, and seals, following the international quotas), and the siblings were on a hunt, at sea, when they landed on the beach. “In…

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How the global rise of border walls is stifling wildlife

How the global rise of border walls is stifling wildlife

Fred Pierce writes: Pity the tiny band of lynx in the Polish half of Europe’s most ancient forest. In June, their home, the Białowieża Forest, was cut in half when the Polish government completed construction of a wall on its border with Belarus. The aim was to repel refugees from the Middle East and elsewhere being channeled to the border by the Belarus government. But the 115-mile wall — which towers 18 feet above the forest floor, stretching almost into…

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‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

‘Vast’ mass of microbes being released by melting glaciers

The Guardian reports: Hundreds of thousands of tonnes of bacteria are being released by melting glaciers, a study has shown. The microbes being washed downstream could fertilise ecosystems, the researchers said, but needed to be much better studied to identify any potential pathogens. The scientists said the rapid melting of the ice by the climate crisis meant the glaciers and the unique microbial ecosystems they harboured were “dying before our eyes”, leaving researchers racing to understand them before they disappeared….

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Did humans inadvertently produce super insects?

Did humans inadvertently produce super insects?

Lina Zeldovich writes: One day, about 60 million years ago, a little leafcutter moth landed on an ancient sycamore tree to lay eggs in its leaves. The larvae grew, nestled inside a comfy enclosure akin to a sleeping bag made between the leaf’s thin layers. Once hatched, they ate their way through to the surface and left to perpetuate their kin. Most of the chewed-up leaves swirled down to the earth, decomposing shortly after. But this leaf, along with a…

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What does water want?

What does water want?

Erica Gies writes: Walking across spongy tundra, among bonsai shrubs on fire with autumn colours, I came upon a river too wide to cross. Gazing up the valley from which it flowed, I saw that the obstacle blocking my path was just one strand of a broad, braided system spread languidly across a floodplain in Denali National Park in Alaska. I watched the McKinley River’s fluid columns shift apart, then twine together. Although at that time I knew little about…

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How online mobs act like flocks of birds

How online mobs act like flocks of birds

Renée DiResta writes: You’ve probably seen it: a flock of starlings pulsing in the evening sky, swirling this way and that, feinting right, veering left. The flock gets denser, then sparser; it moves faster, then slower; it flies in a beautiful, chaotic concert, as if guided by a secret rhythm. Biology has a word for this undulating dance: “murmuration.” In a murmuration, each bird sees, on average, the seven birds nearest it and adjusts its own behavior in response. If…

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