This will surely be controversial but personally I'm convinced.

It's reminiscent of the "garden Earth" theory. This holds that, whether we like it or not, there are basically no truly wild places left. Humans have turned the Earth into a de-facto garden - and they now need to own that fact and behave like better gardeners. I was skeptical (even a bit outraged) at first but I'm coming round to the logic.

Inspiring story. This theme of bridges is going to become ever more important.

Animal communication takes many forms.

Archive link: https://archive.is/Osjfb

Researchers have documented orcas seemingly gifting rays, seals and fish to scientists and divers, which could suggest they have a theory of mind and engage in altruism – even across species

When it rains in Newton, Massachusetts, water rushes off roads, down asphalt gullies, and into Cheesecake Brook – a small stream that was converted many years ago into a narrow channel lined with masonry walls.

During downpours, more water is shunted to the brook than it can hold. Max Rome is with the nonprofit Charles River Watershed Association: “Basically, what we’ve designed is a system that is almost perfectly set up to create flooding.” As climate change causes heavier downpours, the brook is more likely to flood nearby roads and yards. So Rome’s group is working with the city of Newton to restore a section of the brook and reduce those risks.

Instead of sending stormwater to the brook, they’re diverting it into underground tanks. The stormwater will then be able to slowly trickle out of the gravel-lined tanks and into the ground. They’re also planting native vegetation along its banks that will help slow and filter runoff.

Rome: “There’s going to be a lot of really beautiful plants, a lot of flowering, interesting species that are going to be attracting pollinators, attracting birds.”

• Tropical dry forests are critically endangered ecosystems that once covered vast areas of the planet but have been largely destroyed, with less than 8% of the original extent remaining in some regions due to conversion to agriculture and development.
• These forests support hundreds of millions of people who depend on them for essential resources, such as food, medicine and economic opportunities, while also hosting remarkable biodiversity, including jaguars, tapirs and numerous endemic species.
• A 2022 study revealed that more than 71 million hectares of tropical dry forests were lost between 2000-2020 alone — an area twice the size of Germany — with remaining forests under immediate threat in rapidly expanding deforestation frontiers and from climate change, with some areas experiencing two additional months of drought compared to the 1960s.
• Immediate conservation action is crucial as scientists warn that without aggressive intervention, including land restoration, assisted migration and emergency management techniques, these ancient ecosystems face collapse within decades.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Nestled in the eastern edge of Sri Lanka’s Uva province, Nilgala stands out as a landscape of remarkable ecological and cultural importance. Long overlooked in mainstream conservation efforts despite its significance, Nilgala finally received due recognition on June 2 when it was declared a forest reserve covering its full extent of 40,685 hectares (100,543 acres). Located within Sri Lanka’s intermediate climatic zone, Nilgala is primarily covered by dry mixed evergreen forest. However, what truly distinguishes the area is its savanna landscape of open grasslands dotted with trees, which is a rare habitat type in Sri Lanka.

archived (Wayback Machine)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5344173

In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation.“ The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands.”

In putting hundreds of millions of acres of prairie to the plow, settlers not only forcibly displaced Indigenous nations, but completely altered the region’s ancient carbon and nitrogen cycles. They also turned the region into an agricultural powerhouse. The deep black soil once prevalent in the Midwest — the result of thousands of years of animal and plant decomposition depositing untold carbon stores into the ground — became the foundation of the modern food system. But the undoing of the American prairie also dismantled one of the Earth’s most effective climate defenses.

Grasses, like all plant life, inhale planet-warming carbon dioxide. As a result, “​​earth’s soils now contain one-third of the planet’s terrestrial carbon — more than the total released by human activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution,” Hage and Marcotty write. A 2020 Nature study found that restoring just 15 percent of the world’s plowed grasslands could absorb nearly a third of the carbon dioxide humans added to the atmosphere since the 1800s.

Today, the tallgrass prairie, which covered most of Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, and the far eastern edge of the plains states, clings to about 1 percent of its former range. Even the hardier shortgrass prairie of the American West has been reduced by more than half.

Full Article

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/23702048

archived (Wayback Machine)

One kind of Australian moth looks to the stars on its voyage to a summertime refuge.

Stellar cues from the Milky Way’s bright band may help Bogong moths (Agrotis infusa) chart a path from the sizzling plains of southeastern Australia to cool caves in the country’s Snowy Mountains, researchers report June 18 in Nature. While people, some birds and possibly seals rely on the night sky to navigate, Bogong moths are the first known invertebrates to reach a destination they’ve never seen before with help from the stars.

In spring, mounting temperatures and dwindling food sources send the moths roughly 1,000 kilometers south toward the caves, says David Dreyer, a neurobiologist at the Lund University in Sweden. “When they arrive … they line up [on] the walls [and look] like the skin of a rattlesnake.” The moths lie dormant until the fall, when they return to the plains to mate and die.

• A new study has discovered a novel social unit among sarus cranes, where these formerly monogamous birds now form trios to raise their chicks.
• Study authors note that these breeding trios were most observed in more degraded habitats.
• The highly territorial cranes may be forced to change their mating behaviours to increase offspring’s chances of survival as habitat loss in India is on the rise.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• short article
• full article

• Sri Lanka’s isolation during past glacial cycles resulted in the evolution of unique species, but ongoing human-induced climate change now poses a major threat to their survival.
• Using species distribution models, researchers have discovered that montane amphibians and reptiles that are particularly restricted to narrow ecological niches with limited mobility are particularly vulnerable to rising temperatures.
• Species with direct development, like many Pseudophilautus frogs, which bypass the tadpole stage, are especially sensitive to microclimate changes.
• Of the 34 amphibian species confirmed extinct worldwide, 21 were endemic to Sri Lanka, underscoring the island’s fragility and the urgent need for targeted conservation efforts.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Now, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it plans to declare seven species of it as endangered.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5260082

The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

Full Article

A single drawing from a 94-year-old scientific paper has revived interest in one of the more roundabout ways a spider preps its dinner. First swathe a fruit fly or other tidbit of prey in silk. Then throw up toxins all over it.

“I was like … what are you talking about?” says evolutionary biologist Giulia Zancolli of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland as she remembers the moment she read this detail when reviewing another lab’s scientific paper for possible publication in a journal. Tracing back the references, she eventually ended up with a drawing from a 1931 paper. “That was the only evidence we had.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5248565

If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

Full Article (archive link)

Researchers have released new maps documenting the “Great Nile Migration,” the Earth’s largest-known land mammal migration across South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The maps chart the seasonal movements of two antelope species, the white-eared kob (Kobus kob leucotis) and the tiang (Damaliscus lunatus tiang). Every year, around 5 million white-eared kob and 400,000 tiang migrate across 100,000 square kilometers (38,612 square miles) of South Sudan’s wetlands and Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

To protect themselves, the curlews eavesdrop on the alarms coming from prairie dog colonies, according to research published Thursday in the journal Animal Behavior.

so far, scientists have documented only a few instances of birds eavesdropping on mammals.

"That doesn't necessarily mean it's rare in the wild," she said, "it just means we haven't studied it yet."