In tissue samples drawn from elephant skin biopsies across 17 African countries, in collections that have sat in biobanks for more than thirty years, something like a historical record was waiting to be read. Researchers at the University of Copenhagen and their collaborators have now done exactly that: sequenced 232 whole genomes from both savanna … Read more
The collar weighs about a kilogram and transmits six times a day. Fitted to an adult female somewhere in western Hudson Bay, it relays her position to a satellite, which passes that fix to a server, which adds it to a database that now contains more than 230,000 such locations collected from 355 individual bears … Read more
In the backyard birdhouses of Texas and Louisiana, purple martins arrive every February like a kind of promise. They come from the Amazon basin, navigating several thousand kilometres on instinct and timing refined over generations, and the people who put up houses for them, the landlords as they’re known in martin circles, look forward to … Read more
Buried in a container of pig manure or sewage sludge, a black soldier fly larva spends its first weeks doing something genuinely useful: eating. It consumes the organic matter around it, converts it into body mass, and excretes what it cannot use as nutrient-rich pellets called frass. The process is efficient, well-understood, and increasingly seen … Read more
The nurse sharks swimming through Miami’s glowing coastal waters at night aren’t getting much sleep. Their blood tells the story: melatonin levels suppressed, circadian rhythms disrupted, all because the city never really goes dark. For the first time, researchers have measured the hormone in wild sharks and found that artificial light is throwing their biological … Read more
Researchers hovering consumer drones over whale blowholes in northern Norway have detected cetacean morbillivirus circulating in Arctic waters for the first time – a pathogen linked to mass strandings of whales and dolphins worldwide since its discovery in 1987. The approach marks a shift toward non-invasive health surveillance for marine mammals in regions where traditional … Read more
In the forests of California’s Sierra Nevada, what once looked like destruction is turning out to be renewal. A new study finds that low- and moderate-severity wildfires can benefit bird populations for decades, offering fresh evidence that fire is not always the enemy of wildlife it is often made out to be. The research, published … Read more
Gentle giants are getting scarred. A 13-year study shows that nearly four out of five whale sharks in the Bird’s Head Seascape of Indonesian Papua bear injuries from human activities, mostly through contact with fishing platforms and tourist boats. Researchers say these wounds, though often superficial, highlight how fragile the balance is between local livelihoods, … Read more
Michigan’s only rattlesnake is quietly losing ground. A new 15-year study shows that inbreeding among Eastern Massasauga rattlesnakes is reducing survival and reproductive success, raising alarm for the federally threatened species. The research, led by Michigan State University conservation biologists and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, traced family histories of … Read more
They dine where they defecate, swim where they hunt, and swallow prey crawling with parasites. North American river otters in Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay may not follow our hygiene rules, but their eating habits reveal a surprisingly important ecological role. In a new study published in Frontiers in Mammal Science, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center scientists offer … Read more