Feature Channels: Nature

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A research team led by Associate Professor Frank Rheindt from the National University of Singapore found five bird species and five subspecies new to science in three small island groups off Sulawesi, Indonesia. The islands are situated in Indonesia’s Wallacea region, an archipelago at the interface between the Oriental and Australian biogeographical realms, named after Sir Alfred Wallace.

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A study of seven wastewater treatment plants points to two treatment methods — granular activated carbon and ozonation — as being particularly promising for reducing the concentration of pharmaceuticals including certain antidepressants and antibiotics.

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Kangaroo Island is one of South Australia’s most iconic tourism destinations, but as fires continue to rage across the once pristine environment, many holidaymakers are questioning whether to keep or cancel their travel plans.

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Northern Arizona University professors Rebecca Hewitt and Michelle Mack authored the study, published this week in New Phytologist, which could have implications for researchers and computer models that predict where nitrogen and carbon go at both regional and global levels.

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The protection of Australia's threatened species could be improved by a factor of seven, if more efficient 'umbrella' species were prioritised for protection, according to University of Queensland research.

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As the effects of climate change are increasingly felt around the world, possible solutions, from reducing fossil fuel emissions to capturing carbon, have come to dominate policy discussions.

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"Embrace the Gulf 2020" is a year-long positive awareness campaign to highlight the value and the vitality of the Gulf of Mexico region. It includes daily messages across several social media platforms.

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UC San Diego researchers studied nearly 900 vertebrate species and found that bats have unusual gut microbiomes that more closely resemble those of birds than other mammals, raising questions about how evolutionary pressures change the gut microbiome

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Nearly a decade after the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan, researchers from the University of Georgia have found that wildlife populations are abundant in areas void of human life.

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Evaporation ponds, commonly used in many industries to manage wastewater, can occupy a large footprint and often pose risks to birds and other wildlife, yet they’re an economical way to deal with contaminated water. Now researchers at Berkeley Lab have demonstrated a way to double the rate of evaporation by using solar energy and taking advantage of water’s inherent properties, potentially reducing their environmental impact. The study is reported in the journal Nature Sustainability.

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More than half of Earth's rivers freeze over every year. These frozen rivers support important transportation networks for communities and industries located at high latitudes.

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While many conservation plans focus on only environmental indicators for success, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)’s coral reef program is trying a relatively new approach: focusing on both social and ecological processes and outcomes to ensure a long-term future for coral reef systems, according to a newly published study.

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Traditional explanations for why some animals are monogamous and others are promiscuous or polygamous have focused on ecological factors. A new theory focuses instead on social interactions driven by genetically determined behaviors.

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Microorganisms play important roles in the health and protection of coral reefs, yet exploring these connections can be difficult due to the lack of unspoiled reef systems throughout the global ocean. A collaborative study led by scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the Centro de Investigaciones Marinas - Universidad de La Habana (CIM-UH) compared seawater from 25 reefs in Cuba and the U.S. Florida Keys varying in human impact and protection, and found that those with higher microbial diversity and lower concentrations of nutrients and organic carbon—primarily caused by human activities—were markedly healthier.

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A research team led by faculty at Binghamton University, State University of New York has uncovered evidence that the transition toward forests as we know them today began earlier than typically believed.

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Ocean scientists investigate the internal body clocks of sea anemones to determine if fluctuating temperatures play a role in their daily rhythms.

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A new study by a team of Russian and American scientists revealed the first-ever detailed analysis of a tigress from the birth of her cubs through their first four months.

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Budgeting resources isn’t just a problem for humans preparing a holiday dinner, or squirrels storing up nuts for the winter. A new model of how animals budget their energy sheds light on how they live and explains why they tend to evolve toward larger body sizes. The research, published in PNAS, proposes that animal energy budgets are governed by a key mechanism: resource variation — a measure of how spread out or clumped up food and water are.

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When Israeli conservation scientists looked at trends of common bird populations over the last 15 years, they found that invasive bird species are thriving, and native ones are largely declining. They present the reasons for these changes, and flag the importance of strategies to mitigate the spread of non-native birds.

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A team of researchers from the National University of Singapore has found that the effective population size and genetic diversity of Singapore’s Cynopterus brachyotis, believed to remain widely unaffected by urbanisation, has shrunk significantly over the last 90 years – revealing that the current biodiversity crisis may be much broader than widely assumed, affecting even species thought to be common and tolerant of fragmentation and habitat loss.

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Extracting nectar from flowers that may be dancing in the wind requires precise, millisecond timing between the brain and muscles. By capturing and analyzing nearly all of the brain signals sent to the wing muscles of hawk moths (Manduca sexta), which feed on such nectar, researchers have shown that precise timing within rapid sequences of neural signal spikes is essential to controlling the flight muscles necessary for the moths to eat.

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Large, old Chinook salmon have mostly disappeared from the West Coast. A new University of Washington and NOAA study points to the recent rise of resident killer whales, and their insatiable appetite for large Chinook salmon, as the main driver behind the decline of the big fish.

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As carriers for diseases like dengue and Zika, mosquitoes kill more than 1 million people each year and sicken hundreds of millions more. But a better understanding of mosquito reproduction can help humans combat outbreaks of these diseases, which are worsening as the climate warms.

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Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) scientists and a collaborator from the University of Münster reviewed recent work that shows how meteorites exhibit a fundamental isotopic dichotomy between non-carbonaceous (NC) and carbonaceous (CC – rocks or sediments containing carbon or its compounds) groups, which most likely represent material from the inner and outer solar system.

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Exposure to underwater pile driving noise, which can be associated with the construction of docks, piers, and offshore wind farms, causes squid to exhibit strong alarm behaviors, according to a study by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) researchers published Dec. 16, 2019, in the journal Marine Pollution Bulletin.

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In their first attempt to quantify stormwater ponds, researchers with the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences found about 76,000 such ponds statewide. Many master-planned communities, especially in Florida, rely on stormwater ponds for flood control and water treatment. But the ponds also can be homes to many invasive plant species, which are costly to control.

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Galaxies lead a graceful existence on cosmic timescales. Over millions of years, they can engage in elaborate dances that produce some of Nature’s most exquisite and striking grand designs. Few are as captivating as the galactic duo known as NGC 5394/5, sometimes nicknamed the Heron Galaxy. This image, obtained by the Gemini Observatory of NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, captures a snapshot of this compelling interacting pair.

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What could Azteca ants in coffee farms in Mexico have in common with leopards' spots and zebras' stripes?

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Arctic sea-ice is in decline, causing polar bears in the Barents Sea region to alter their feeding and hunting habits. Bears that follow sea-ice to offshore areas have higher pollutant levels than those staying on land — but why? A study in ACS’ Environmental Science & Technology reports the likely reasons.

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Groups collaborate on future ventures

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Join in celebrating World Soil Day on December 5th

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Extreme drought’s impact on plants will become more dominant under future climate change, as noted in a paper out today in the journal Nature Climate Change. Analysis shows that not only will droughts become more frequent under future climates, but more of those events will be extreme, adding to the reduction of plant production essential to human and animal populations.

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“Bioplastics—a better option for the environment?” is a compilation of information about bioplastics. These alternative plastics have become more popular, and as it turns out, they’re effectively still the same as petroleum-based plastic, according to Dr. McGuire’s document.

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Neuroscientists have decoded how visual cues reorganize the activity of compass neurons in fruit flies to maintain an accurate sense of direction. Tracking individual neurons as flies navigate a virtual reality environment, they shed light on how organisms build a spatial map of their world.