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Category: Ecology

Want to save the bees? Pay attention to pathogens and flowers

Want to save the bees? Pay attention to pathogens and flowers

University of Massachusetts Amherst: New research published in the journal Ecology conclusively shows that certain physical traits of flowers affect the health of bumblebees by modulating the transmission of a harmful pathogen called Crithidia bombi. In particular, the research, conducted by scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, shows that the length of a flower’s corolla, or the flower’s petals, affects how this pathogen gets transferred between bees because shorter corollas mean that fewer bee feces wind up inside the…

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More than half of U.S. bird populations are shrinking

More than half of U.S. bird populations are shrinking

Smithsonian Magazine reports: Interest in birds and birdwatching surged during the Covid-19 pandemic, with legions of birders, new and old, recording the details of their feathered sightings with apps such as eBird. In the process, these citizen scientists delivered a glut of high-resolution data that has been a boon to American ornithologists looking to better understand bird populations. Combined with decades of traditional biological surveys, this trove of data tells a story, and not a happy one. A new report…

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Are we in the midst of a silent mass extinction?

Are we in the midst of a silent mass extinction?

Andy Carstens writes: Nearly one fifth of the genetic diversity of the planet’s most vulnerable species may already be lost, an analysis published today (September 22) in Science finds. If accurate, it would mean that many species are already below a conservation threshold proposed last year by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) a part of the United Nations Environment Programme. Moisés Expósito-Alonso was in his back yard in Menlo Park, California, last year reading a monograph on the unified…

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Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Climate change threatens up to 100% of trees in Australian cities, and most urban species worldwide

Photo: Jaana Dielenberg, Author provided By Manuel Esperon-Rodriguez, Western Sydney University; Jaana Dielenberg, Charles Darwin University; Jonathan Lenoir, Université de Picardie Jules Verne (UPJV); Mark G Tjoelker, Western Sydney University, and Rachael Gallagher, Western Sydney University To anyone who has stepped off a hot pavement into a shady park, it will come as little surprise that trees (and shrubs) have a big cooling effect on cities. Our study published today in Nature Climate Change found climate change will put 90-100%…

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On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

On Earth, ants outnumber humans by about 2.5 million to one

The Washington Post reports: It’s the ants’ world, and we’re just visiting. A new estimate for the total number of ants burrowing and buzzing on Earth comes to a whopping total of nearly 20 quadrillion individuals. That staggering sum — 20,000,000,000,000,000, or 20,000 trillion — reveals ants’ astonishing ubiquity even as scientists grow concerned a possible mass die off of insects could upend ecosystems. In a paper released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a group…

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How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts

How parasites manipulate the behavior of their hosts

Laith Al-Shawaf writes: What if some outside force could control your mind and make you act against your own interests? It’s a terrifying prospect—one that captures our imagination and recurs frequently in our fiction. It’s the goal of one of the three Unforgivable Curses in Harry Potter. It’s the purpose of Newspeak, the fictional language in George Orwell’s 1984. It enthralls in classics such as Brave New World and The Manchurian Candidate. In the 1950s, the CIA was so concerned…

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Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Chaos researchers can now predict perilous points of no return

Ben Brubaker writes: Predicting complex systems like the weather is famously difficult. But at least the weather’s governing equations don’t change from one day to the next. In contrast, certain complex systems can undergo “tipping point” transitions, suddenly changing their behavior dramatically and perhaps irreversibly, with little warning and potentially catastrophic consequences. On long enough timescales, most real-world systems are like this. Consider the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic, which transports warm equatorial water northward as part of an…

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The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

The most damaging farm products? Organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb

George Monbiot writes: Perhaps the most important of all environmental issues is land use. Every hectare of land we use for extractive industries is a hectare that can’t support wild forests, savannahs, wetlands, natural grasslands and other crucial ecosystems. And farming swallows far more land than any other human activity. What are the world’s most damaging farm products? You might be amazed by the answer: organic, pasture-fed beef and lamb. I realise this is a shocking claim. Of all the…

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The legacy of James Lovelock

The legacy of James Lovelock

John Gribbin writes: Jim Lovelock (never ‘James’) is remembered as the father of the Gaia hypothesis: the idea that Earth is a self-regulating living organism. Few accepted his argument that this should be elevated to the status of a theory, even though it generated predictions about environmental changes that were borne out by subsequent observations. As a heuristic model, however, Gaia profoundly influenced thinking about the environment and how we interact with it, giving rise to the field of Earth-system…

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Scientists warn of dire effects as Mediterranean heats up

Scientists warn of dire effects as Mediterranean heats up

The Associated Press reports: While vacationers might enjoy the Mediterranean Sea’s summer warmth, climate scientists are warning of dire consequences for its marine life as it burns up in a series of severe heat waves. From Barcelona to Tel Aviv, scientists say they are witnessing exceptional temperature hikes ranging from 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) to 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above the norm for this time of year. Water temperatures have regularly exceeded 30 C (86 F) on some…

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Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame

Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame

Grist reports: When governments make decisions, economic considerations often trump everything else — human well-being, social connections, the health of the environment. According to a new report from the United Nations, this imbalance is driving the global biodiversity crisis and the human suffering associated with it. “Despite the diversity of nature’s values,” the report says, “most policymaking approaches have prioritized a narrow set of values at the expense of both nature and society, as well as future generations.” It calls…

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Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Carolyn Beans writes: Last June, Aaron Flansburg felt the temperature spike and knew what that meant for his canola crop. A fifth-generation grower in Washington state, Flansburg times his canola planting to bloom in the cool weeks of early summer. But last year, his fields were hit with 108-degree Fahrenheit heat just as flowers opened. “That is virtually unheard of for our area to have a temperature like that in June,” he says. Yellow blooms sweltered, reproduction stalled, and many…

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The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

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How I started to see trees as smart

How I started to see trees as smart

Matthew Hutson writes: A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil. Gulping water and catching my breath, I admired both its beauty and its resilience. Its twisty, weathered branches had endured by wresting moisture and nutrients from seemingly unwelcoming terrain, solving a puzzle beyond my…

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Lowly mushrooms may be key to ecosystem survival in a warming world

Lowly mushrooms may be key to ecosystem survival in a warming world

Elizabeth Pennisi writes: The red, orange, and spotted mushrooms that sprout up after it rains are doing more than adding color to the landscape. The fungi that produce them could be keeping the natural world productive and stable, according to a new study. Indeed, they may be critical to the health of Earth’s ecosystems, says Matthias Rillig, a soil ecologist at the Free University Berlin who was not involved with the work. There are 70,000 known kinds of fungi. These…

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Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Indian court rules nature has legal status on par with humans. We are required to protect it

Inside Climate News reports: The highest court in one of India’s 28 states ruled last month that “Mother Nature” has the same legal status as a human being, which includes “all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person.” The decision from Madras High Court, located in the southeastern state of Tamil Nadu, also said that the natural environment is part of the human right to life, and that humans have an environmental duty to future generations. “The past…

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