By David Shiffman One of the most fascinating challenges of endangered species management is the concept of shifting baselines — the idea that how much worse a problem has gotten, and what your recovery goal should be, depends on when you start measuring the problem. In many cases we need scientific data on the population […]
It turns out that humans aren’t the only animals who pound out beats to express themselves. A new study published in Animal Behavior Tuesday found that male chimpanzees in Uganda’s Budongo Forest use “individual drumming ‘signatures’” when they drum on the buttress roots of trees, so much so that researchers could compare different chimps to […]
A new study from scientists and Indigenous organizations has found that many parts of the Amazon rainforest are already at their tipping point, meaning they face a point of no return when it comes to recovery. “The tipping point is not a future scenario but rather a stage already present in some areas of the […]
By Tom Langen Although it still feels like beach weather across much of North America, billions of birds have started taking wing for one of nature’s great spectacles: fall migration. Birds fly south from the northern U.S. and Canada to wintering grounds in the southern U.S., Caribbean and Latin America, sometimes covering thousands of miles. […]
Rodents make up about 40 percent of all mammal species and most of the non-flying mammals on Earth. They evolved at least 178 million years ago and were the first mammals to scurry around underfoot of the dinosaurs, until all but the birds disappeared 66 million years ago, according to Nature. In a new study, […]
One of the challenges urban planners face as they attempt to fashion climate-friendly cities is how to construct new buildings. Common materials steel and cement are notoriously difficult to decarbonize, yet the number of people living in cities could increase to 80 percent of the total population by 2100, potentially requiring more new construction between […]
By John R. Platt A few times a year, wildlife officials in Texas receive excited phone calls. “I just saw something that looks like a really big cat, or maybe a giant weasel,” a caller might say. “Was it a jaguarundi?” No, they’re not reporting a sighting of a mythical beast like the chupacabra. But […]
There were once so many giant tortoises living on Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands that Spanish explorers named the archipelago after the Spanish world for tortoise — galápago — when they first explored it in 1535, according to National Geographic. Yet hunting caused their numbers to plummet from at least 250,000 hundreds of years ago to only […]
The fifth round of United Nations talks that began in New York on August 15 and were aimed at securing a UN Ocean Treaty to protect marine life in the international waters of the High Seas has ended in another stalemate, reported The Guardian. The treaty would have established regulations for the protection of biodiversity […]
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