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-intentioned introduction of five cats to control mice instead unleashed an ecological catastrophe that would take forty years and thousands of hours to partially reverse.
Sep 17, 2026
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
A handful of electrical towers became magnets for nesting storks, forcing Spanish grid operators into an uncomfortable choice between maintaining infrastructure and protecting a species that had nearly vanished from the continent.
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
It is the first evidence of a long-term stretching in sea turtle breeding intervals, and the authors' most parsimonious reading is that foraging conditions have deteriorated, though they cannot yet say how much of it is crowding and how much a warming ocean.
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
