Nature and ecology
Natural History is Science Blog's desk for the living world. Animals, evolution, and ecology, reported from the field science and the papers rather than the press releases.
A well-meaning gardener's slug solution became an island's ecological catastrophe, forcing Scotland to spend millions to undo forty years of unintended consequences.
Sep 17, 2026
A wildlife refuge created to protect seabirds became the perfect hunting ground for an industry the government itself had engineered.
Sep 17, 2026
Between 2016 and 2019, crews maintaining a stretch of Spain's high-voltage transmission network pulled 839 white stork nests off the tops of steel pylons, according to a peer-reviewed study of the work.
Sep 17, 2026
The latest global reassessment covered 1,199 sharks, rays and chimaeras: 32.6 percent directly qualified as threatened, rising to an estimated 37.5 percent when Data Deficient species are accounted for.
Sep 16, 2026
A clerical mistake at a British wildlife sanctuary sparked a three-decade battle to eradicate an invasive species that nearly succeeded before nearly vanishing.
Sep 16, 2026
In 1993 the Sea Turtle Research Unit began walking a short stretch of sand on Redang Island every night of the nesting season.
Sep 16, 2026
A tropical fish that mastered land travel found the perfect escape route: Florida's sprawling canal system.
Sep 16, 2026
New World screwworm is an obligate parasite whose larvae invade living tissue. Its tiny entry wounds, rapid life cycle and unusual vulnerability to sterile males explain both the danger and control.
Sep 16, 2026
A Hell Creek theropod coprolite preserved an exposed flight feather, additional hidden feathers, bird bones and fish scales, recording anatomy and a food chain in one fossil.
Sep 15, 2026
Ming was frozen with roughly 200 research specimens before its age was known. A later count of 507 annual shell rings placed its birth around 1499.
Sep 13, 2026
A picturesque introduction of two swans to Michigan a century ago has become an ecological crisis the state now races to reverse.
Sep 12, 2026
A museum series of Sorex unguiculatus from Tomakomai confirms Dehnel's winter braincase shrink in an Asian shrew, and adds a reverse pattern in the snout that the authors did not find in the jaw.
Sep 12, 2026
The difference is real and the size of it is not settled: measured against the best of the study's three control batches, the advantage shrinks from 27 percentage points to five.
Sep 12, 2026
Fifteen of the 18 recruited parrots made 147 voluntary calls after training. The behavior was real, but preferred partners and newly learned skills require careful reading.
Sep 11, 2026
