Biodiversity

"Light can be deadly. Many animals and plants are threatened by artificial light. Numerous organisms have found their evolutionary niche in the dark of night, and now have to adapt to bright nights."

"Drive down any of the long, rutted back roads of Anza, a dusty Riverside County community, and it won’t take long before you feel like you’ve fallen off the grid."

"Sperm whales live in clans with distinctive cultures, much like those of humans, a study has found."

"Understanding animal and environmental microbiomes could be the key to successfully reintroducing captive animals to the wild".

"In summer, South Georgia island’s Cumberland Bay now sees whale numbers that rival the early days of whaling."

"Diseases from land animals are killing marine mammals at an alarming rate. Can we stem the flow of feces?"

"It’s a question that has bedeviled beekeepers across the US in recent years: where has all the honey gone? Scientists now say they have some answers as to why yields of honey have declined, pointing to environmental degradation that is affecting all sorts of bees, and insects more generally."

"Farms across California have had to euthanize several million chickens and ducks in recent weeks, as a wave of avian influenza threatens to upend national poultry and egg supplies."

"Rising temperatures have spurred an influx of beavers to Alaska and northern Canada ‘on a huge scale’".

"When the mule deer buck died in October, it perished in a place most humans would consider the middle of nowhere, miles from the nearest road. But its last breaths were not taken in an isolated corner of American geography. It succumbed to a long-dreaded disease in the backcountry of Yellowstone national park, north-west Wyoming – the first confirmed case of chronic wasting disease in the country’s most famous nature reserve."