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Category: Ecology

The oceans are missing their rivers

The oceans are missing their rivers

Erica Gies writes: Gazing out from the eighth floor of a hotel in Georgetown, Guyana, the broad expanse of the Atlantic Ocean was a muddy brown. Only a thin rim of blue on the horizon showed the ocean’s true color; the rest swirled with sediment emerging from the mouth of the Essequibo River. In a rhythm that’s pulsed through epochs, a river’s plume carries sediment and nutrients from the continental interior into the ocean, a major exchange of resources from…

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Phosphorus saved our way of life — and now threatens to end it

Phosphorus saved our way of life — and now threatens to end it

Elizabeth Kolbert writes: In the fall of 1802, the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt arrived in Callao, Peru’s major port, just west of Lima. Humboldt had timed his visit to coincide with a transit of Mercury, which he planned to observe through a three-foot telescope, in order to determine Lima’s longitude. He set up his instruments atop a fort on the waterfront, and then, with a few days to kill before the event, wandered the docks. A powerful stench emanating…

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Video: Alexander Skarsgård, Partha Dasgupta and the answer to everything

Video: Alexander Skarsgård, Partha Dasgupta and the answer to everything

  Partha Dasgupta is a Cambridge University economist who in 2021 prepared a more than 600-page report for the British government about the financial value of nature. Not your average bedtime reading. But believe us when we say his report, the culmination of decades of scholarship, is incredibly important. Or at least believe the United Nations, which awarded him the title Champion of the Earth for his work. Or King Charles III, who this year made Mr. Dasgupta a Knight…

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‘Rewilding’ parts of the planet could have big climate benefits

‘Rewilding’ parts of the planet could have big climate benefits

Bob Berwyn writes: Restoring populations of land and marine animals in targeted “rewilding” zones would speed up biological carbon pumps that remove carbon dioxide from the air and sequester the greenhouse gas where it doesn’t harm the climate, new research shows. An international team of scientists focused the study on marine fish, whales, sharks, gray wolves, wildebeest, sea otters, musk oxen, African forest elephants and American bison as species, or groups of species, that accelerate the carbon cycle. Collectively, they “could facilitate…

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How Europe’s first wild river national park saw off the dams

How Europe’s first wild river national park saw off the dams

The Guardian reports: The fast-moving Vjosa River in Albania curves and braids, sweeping our raft away from the floodplain towards the opposite bank, and back again. The islands that split the waterway in two are temporary, forming, growing, then dissipating so that this truly wild river, one of the last in Europe, never looks the same. “There’s a saying, ‘you can’t step in the same river twice’,” says Ulrich Eichelmann, the head of Riverwatch, a Vienna-based NGO for river protection,…

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Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Seabirds that swallow ocean plastic waste have scarring in their stomachs – scientists have named this disease ‘plasticosis’

Scientists have identified a condition they call plasticosis, caused by ingesting plastic waste, in flesh-footed shearwaters. Patrick Kavanagh/Wikipedia, CC BY By Matthew Savoca, Stanford University As a conservation biologist who studies plastic ingestion by marine wildlife, I can count on the same question whenever I present research: “How does plastic affect the animals that eat it?” This is one of the biggest questions in this field, and the verdict is still out. However, a recent study from the Adrift Lab,…

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Climate is changing too quickly for the Sierra Nevada’s ‘zombie forests’

Climate is changing too quickly for the Sierra Nevada’s ‘zombie forests’

NPR reports: Some of the tall, stately trees that have grown up in California’s Sierra Nevada are no longer compatible with the climate they live in, new research has shown. Hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change in the mountain range have made certain regions once hospitable to conifers — such as sequoia, ponderosa pine and Douglas fir — an environmental mismatch for the cone-bearing trees. “They were exactly where we expected them to be, kind of along the lower-elevation,…

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The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The creeping threat of the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt

The Guardian reports: Seaweed has been having a moment. Eco-influencers and columnists rave about its benefits, in everything from beauty products to biofuels. Jamie Oliver has embraced it as a recipe ingredient; Victoria Beckham uses it to keep off the pounds. And they’re right: seaweed is packed with nutrition, it sucks up carbon and is an amazingly versatile addition to the green economy. But one type of seaweed is not a benign force. Vast fields of sargassum, a brown seaweed,…

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Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Indigenous knowledge is key to sustainable food systems

Alexandre Antonelli writes: I grew up in Campinas, a city in southeast Brazil. The apples there, cultivated from European varieties since the 1960s, tasted sweet. But, given the choice, I would always pick papayas grown in our garden. My father, who knew that growing a temperate fruit tree in a tropical country seldom worked, instead filled our garden with tropical ones, including two varieties of papaya. Meanwhile, drawing on knowledge from her Indigenous roots, my mother grew all sorts of…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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