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Category: Ecology

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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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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