Feature Channels: Nature

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To woo a mate, the Albert’s Lyrebird of Australia becomes a real song-and-dance bird. Each male first chooses a stage of entangled vines, then in performance he shakes the vines as part of his courtship footwork, synchronizing each shake with the beat of his striking song.

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Research highlights the potential significance of ectomycorrhizal fungi diversity in promoting forest ecosystem health and strengthening the symbiotic relationship between mycorrhizae and host plants.

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The following statement was released today by Central Park Zoo:Postmortem testing has been completed for Flaco, the Eurasian eagle owl that was found down in the courtyard of a Manhattan building a little over a year after his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo was vandalized on February 2, 2023.

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According to the traditional model of nuclear shells, oxygen-28 is expected to be a doubly magic nucleus with 20 neutrons and 8 protons. However, an experiment performed at the Rare Isotope Beam Facility in Japan measured the direct decay of oxygen-28 into four neutrons and oxygen-24 and found that it is not a bound nucleus.

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“USFICA would create a public-private partnership to save wildlife and wild places around the world. What that means is government funds would leverage private support, making public dollars go much farther. And those monies would go directly to protected areas and parks around the world.” John Calvelli, WCS Executive VP for Public Affairs

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In a new study recently published in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, an international team of scientists led by palaeobiologist Julia Türtscher from the University of Vienna has explored the puzzling world of rays that lived 150 million years ago and discovered a previously hidden diversity – including a new ray species.

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In natural environments, plants encounter biotic and abiotic stresses that can significantly affect their productivity and health.

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Roots play a vital role in plant health, adapting to environmental changes and indicating crop growth.

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Animal reproductive medicine, theriogenology, helps with breeding and conservation of species, says Tufts University faculty member.

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A study led by University of Florida scientists published today in the journal of Trends and Ecology and Evolution advocates for change to promote standardized practices in the field – a practice that has been missing from the science.

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Funding of field conservation research stations worldwide has been drastically reduced since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, raising the alarm for more than 170 conservation researchers representing 157 field stations in 56 countries in a new paper published in Conservation Letters.

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The blue whale genome was published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, and the Etruscan shrew genome was published in the journal Scientific Data.

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Leafhoppers, a common backyard insect, secrete and coat themselves in tiny mysterious particles that could provide both the inspiration and the instructions for next-generation technology, according to a new study led by Penn State researchers.

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A study highlights the significant advancements in water environment analysis facilitated by the Landsat missions. This research, for the first time, offers a comprehensive global assessment of cloud-free observations (NCOs) from Landsat, underscoring its pivotal role in environmental and hydrological studies.

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Researchers from the University of Arizona and the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a Department of Energy user facility, discovered that that plants can maintain specific microbe partnerships during times of drought, revealing a new level of resilience.

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Born this winter, Bobbin, 7 weeks old; and Sage, 3 weeks old have joined a flock of 8 adult sheep in the Tisch Children’s Zoo.

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Recent studies highlight a significant transformation in China’s urban landscape, where the greening of city cores is compensating for vegetation loss in expanding urban areas.

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A recent study reveals significant shifts in the composition of global forests and their carbon stocks from 2001 to 2020.

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The fertility of both female and male tsetse flies is affected by a single burst of hot weather, researchers at the University of Bristol and Stellenbosch University in South Africa have found.

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New research led by the University of South Australia explains how eating faeces (known as coprophagy) shapes wild birds’ digestive tracts (gut biota), enabling them to absorb lost or deficient nutrients and adjust to seasonal variations in food sources.

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The researchers carried out a hybridization experiment between female koi carp and male Chinese rare minnow, eventually obtaining allodiploid and allotriploid hybrid offspring. They made a systemic comparison between them and found that the triploid hybrids showed faster growth, higher expression of growth-promoting genes and lower expression of growth-inhibiting genes than the diploid hybrids. This study provides implications to explain the faster growth of polyploid fish.

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The SMART Partnership is pleased to announce the inaugural SMART Global Congress in Windhoek, Namibia from 10-14 March 2024.

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PNNL scientists have been studying how rivers and streams breathe. Their research focuses on respiration, organic matter, and natural disturbances that affect rivers and streams.

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A streaming camera has gone live on the Great Horned Owl named Athena. She's nested for more than a dozen years at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas. Now, everyone can see her family grow.

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Anoles are the scuba-diving champions of the lizard world, able to stay underwater for more than 16 minutes. For animals whose body temperature depends on the environment, time spent in a cool running stream can have some tradeoffs, according to new research from Binghamton University, State University of New York.

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For more than a decade, invasive Asian honeybees have defied evolutionary expectations and established a thriving population in North Queensland, much to the annoyance of the honey industry and biosecurity officials.

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Imagine: You find the dried-up remains of a once green and lush philodendron on your bookshelf and realize you can’t remember the last time you watered your houseplants.

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A team of researchers from the University of Massachusetts Amherst that specializes in accounting for the carbon dioxide release by streams, rivers and lakes recently demonstrated that the chemical process known as “carbonate buffering” can account for the majority of emissions in highly alkaline waters.

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The critical role of gardeners in identifying 'future invaders' - ornamental plants that could become invasive species – has been revealed by researchers from the University of Reading and the Royal Horticultural Society.

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Walleye are one of the most sought-after species in freshwater sportfishing, a delicacy on Midwestern menus and a critically important part of the culture of many Indigenous communities. They are also struggling to survive in the warming waters of the Midwestern United States and Canada.According to a new study published Feb. 26 in the journal Limnology and Oceanography Letters, part of the problem is that walleye are creatures of habit, and the seasons — especially winter — are changing so fast that this iconic species of freshwater fish can’t keep up.

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This study uses forest inventory data from over 25,000 plots to show that the prevalence of tree pests is jointly controlled by the diversity and phylogenetic composition of forests.

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With fish stocks declining globally, more than 190 countries recently made a commitment to protect about a third of the world’s oceans within “Marine Protected Areas,” or MPAs by the year 2030.

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Among the vast expanse of Antarctica lies the Thwaites Glacier, the world’s widest glacier measuring about 80 miles on the western edge of the continent.

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Eight new Pacific bee species and new insights into Fijian bird behaviour on Viti Levu Island have been described in new scientific studies led by Flinders University.

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In 1934, American entomologist Elwood Zimmerman, then an undergraduate student at Berkeley, participated in the ‘Mangarevan expedition’ to Polynesia.

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Copper smelting, a critical process in metal production, often leads to the generation of slag containing valuable metals. Traditionally, this slag has been discarded, causing environmental issues and resource loss. A recent study introduce a method for recovering copper, lead, and zinc from copper smelting slag, addressing both environmental concerns and resource recovery.

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Forests in the coolest, wettest parts of the western Pacific Northwest are likely to see the biggest increases in burn probability, fire size and number of blazes as the climate continues to get warmer and drier, according to new modeling led by an Oregon State University scientist.

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A study of more than 60,000 specimens of snakes and lizards worldwide reveals that snakes stand out alone in the evolution of reptiles. The team of scientists discovered that snakes evolved incredibly fast, as their ancestors shed limbs and adapted on multiple levels to live and spread out into thousands of species of snakes over 66 million years, up to today.

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Researchers evaluated the prevalence, concentration and tissue distribution of essential and non-essential trace elements, including heavy metal toxicants in tissue (blubber, kidney, liver, skeletal muscle, skin) and fecal samples. Findings reveal how toxicant levels relate to their sex, breed, age and other demographic factors.

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Biologists have discovered a breeding population of a Cantor's Giant Softshell Turtle, as part of conservation efforts in the south of India.

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Membranes of vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (VaCNT) can be used to clean or desalinate water at high flow rate and low pressure. Recently, researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and partners carried out steroid hormone adsorption experiments to study the interplay of forces in the small pores. They found that VaCNT of specific pore geometry and pore surface structure are suited for use as highly selective membranes. The researchers report in Nature Communications. (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-44883-2)

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In a world where human activities have left an indelible mark on ecosystems, the preservation of species and natural landscapes has become an urgent global concern.

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A team of scientists on location with a film crew in the remote Amazon has uncovered a previously undocumented species of giant anaconda.

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The reproduction of giant sea spiders in Antarctica has been largely unknown to researchers for more than 140 years, until now.

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In a group of plants that is famous for luring its pollinators into a death trap, one species offers its flowers as a nursery in exchange.