Ecosystems
- Animals
Native pollinators boost crop yields worldwide
Farms with crops from coffee to mangoes don’t get the best yields if they rely solely on honeybees.
- Humans
U.S. team breaks through subglacial lake
Testing should continue for a day or more, probing for life in the Antarctic depths.
- Life
Victorian zoological map redrawn
Species distribution patterns that inspired Darwin and Wallace get an update.
- Tech
Antarctic test of novel ice drill poised to begin
Any day now, a team of 40 scientists and support personnel expects to begin using a warm, high pressure jet of water to bore a 30 centimeter hole through 83 meters of ice. Once it breaks through to the sea below, they’ll have a few days to quickly sample life from water before the hole begins freezing up again. It's just a test. But if all goes well, in a few weeks the team will move 700 miles and bore an even deeper hole to sample for freshwater life that may have been living for eons outside even indirect contact with Earth’s atmosphere.
- Humans
Warning to bats: Cuddle not
Ecologist Kate Langwig of Boston University and her colleagues want Eastern bats to listen up: No more cuddling — at least during hibernation. Just keep those wings to yourselves.
- Ecosystems
Changing seasons inspire science
Researchers are tapping into the wealth of observations being made by citizen scientists nationwide. One of the largest repositories of such data is maintained by the USA National Phenology Network.
- Life
Blue-green algae release chemical suspected in some amphibian deformities
Retinoic acid levels high in waterways rich in cyanobacteria blooms.
- Animals
Bat killer hits endangered grays
The news on white-nose syndrome just keeps spiraling downward. The fungal infection, which first emerged six years ago, has now been confirmed in a seventh species of North American bats — the largely cave-dwelling grays (Myotis grisecens). The latest victims were struck while hibernating this past winter in two Tennessee counties.
- Ecosystems
Darwin’s Devices
What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology, by John Long.
- Animals
Better bird nesting also good for giant manta rays
Disrupting tree canopies on a Pacific atoll discourages big fish off shore through a long chain of ecological consequences.
- Life
Climate change may leave many mammals homeless
In some places over the next century, projected warming threatens the survival of more than one in three species.
- Humans
Bat killer is still spreading
Since 2006, some 6 million to 7 million North American bats have succumbed to white-nose syndrome, a virulent fungal disease. That figure, issued in January by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, at least sextupled the former estimate that biologists had been touting. But the sharp jump in the cumulative death toll isn’t the only disturbing new development. On April 2, scientists confirmed that white-nose fungus has apparently struck bats hibernating in two small Missouri caves. The first signs of clinical disease have also just emerged in Europe.
