What is the oldest tree in the world? Up until recently, the record-holder was the “Methuselah” bristlecone pine in California’s White Mountains, which has been dated as 4,852 years old, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. However, a contender from another hemisphere is coming for its crown: an alerce (Fitzroya cupressoides) in Chile known […]
Despite recent news that overwintering monarch butterfly populations have increased 35% in the past year, these graceful creatures are still facing an unsteady future after years of ongoing decline. Monarch butterflies are a migratory species. Eastern monarch butterflies, which make up the vast majority of monarch butterflies in North America, travel from southern Canada and […]
Could urbanization make it harder for some animals to adapt to the climate crisis? A study published in the journal PLOS ONE last year found that the populations of Western tiger snakes (Notechis scutatus occidentalis) that were the most cut off from others due to urbanization in and around Perth, Australia, had reduced genetic diversity, […]
Three oil companies have canceled their leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Drilling in the refuge has long been a controversial issue, as the 19.5-million-acre wilderness area is home to 45 species of mammals including polar bears, bowhead whales and caribou and considered sacred by the Indigenous Gwich’in people, according to the Gwich’in Steering […]
Around 6,000 years ago, more than two-thirds of Europe was covered in forest, a 2018 study found. But because of land clearing for agriculture and the use of wood for fuel, that number has more than halved, and today only around one third of Europe is woodland. In some countries like the UK and the […]
Species cross-breed in nature in order to share traits that bolster them from certain environmental changes, and cross-breeding may become more common as the planet heats up and animals migrate to cooler areas. For instance, as grizzly bears have made their way north, Canada and Alaska have become home to “grolar bears,” The Guardian reported. […]
Increasingly, farmers around the world are moving into urban centers in an act called “rural outmigration,” leaving hundreds of millions of acres of land to be reclaimed by the Earth. The farmers abandon their croplands for various reasons having to do with finances, conflicts or climate change, but, whatever the catalyst, the abandonment of former […]
A teenage girl in California who shut down a toxic oil-drilling site; a Nigerian lawyer who got long-overdue justice for communities devastated by two Shell pipeline spills; two Indigenous Ecuadorians who protected their ancestral lands from gold mining. These are just some of the inspiring winners of this year’s so-called “Green Nobel Prize.” The Goldman […]
What grows up to eight inches long, is dark with a white band, can leap a foot in the air and is the latest threat to California’s forest ecosystems? The answer is the Asian jumping worm (Amynthas agrestis), a uniquely mobile species of earthworm with an impressive appetite that was sighted in the state for […]
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