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It's "Treasure Island" author Robert Louis Stevenson who is credited with coining the phrase "You cannot make an omelet without breaking eggs." For us humans, it's now cliché. For pathogens, these are words to live by. Or, rather, spread by.
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Every autumn, billions of birds migrate across the eastern U.S. en route to their wintering sites. As the birds undertake their journeys, however, they are faced with increasing threats, including habitat loss, storms, feral cats and other predators, pesticides, collisions with buildings, and climate change. Not only are individual species impacted by these threats, but so is the migratory phenomenon itself.
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Mountains are home to more than 85% of the world's amphibian, bird and mammal species. Lowland slopes are rich in animal and plant species. And rugged, high-elevation environments, although lacking such biological diversity, play a key role in maintaining biodiversity in the wider mountain catchment area.
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The Cayman Islands has announced it will start culling feral cats to help save a dwindling colony of brown booby birds.
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Conservationists are workingto rid a remote French southern Indian Ocean island of rodents and stray cats by the end of next year to protect prized albatrosses and other birds.
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Recent flooding and water flow management in previous years have led to vast numbers of waterbirds, including large nesting colonies of Straw-necked Ibis and Royal Spoonbill, breeding at wetlands throughout the Northern and Central Murray Darling Basin (MDB).
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The island of Hispaniola once had among the highest diversity of rodents in the Caribbean, supporting 11 species that coexisted for thousands of years. Today, only one rodent species remains within the island's two countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and its prospects for survival are uncertain. There are many theories as to why so many species went extinct, but it's unclear exactly when each disappeared, making it difficult to determine the cause.
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The new year brings challenges to Biden administration regulators: how to handle environmentally unfriendly riders inserted by lawmakers into the fiscal 2023 spending bill.
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In 1962, renowned American conservationist Rachel Carson wrote a book entitled "Silent Spring" after she noticed the birdsong she used to wake up to as a child had been thinning. Its eventual absence had become almost deafening.
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With the world's population topping 8 billion last year, it's clear that humans have achieved a unique status in Earth's history. We are the only creature that dominate all other organisms on the planet, from animals and fungi to plants and microbes.
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Grasshoppers have a bad reputation. They're not popular with gardeners And locusts, a type of swarming grasshopper, can do huge damage to vegetation and crops when they're in a feeding frenzy.
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The twisting road that leads to Indonesia's future capital is lined with dense rainforest and pockets of plantations, punctuated every so often with monkeys enjoying a laze out on the tarmac.
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When an outbreak of sylvatic plague decimated black-tailed prairie dog numbers in the Thunder Basin National Grassland in 2017, researchers saw an opportunity for a "natural experiment" to explore the impact of the rodents' die-off on the plants and other wildlife in that area of northeast Wyoming.
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As vegetation is removed to make way for urban development, wild species experience a dramatic loss of habitat, making it more difficult for city dwellers to interact with wildlife.
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In the latest Journal of Applied Ecology, researchers from the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) say a more strategic approach to wildlife-friendly farming schemes is required to recover England's farmland bird populations after monitoring their responses to different agri-environment scheme implementation levels.
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Researchers at Hokkaido University have revealed the effects of high pathogenicity avian influenza virus infection on an Ezo red fox and a Japanese raccoon dog, linking their infection to a recorded die-off of crows.
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Not everybody can travel to Antarctica for months at a time to study the continent's unique ecology, flora and fauna.
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The largest flightless bird found anywhere in the world today is the ostrich. It stands about 2.5 metres tall and can weigh up to 240kg. But millions of years ago ostriches would have been dwarfed by several other flightless bird species.
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Biologging is the practice of attaching devices to animals so that scientific data can be collected. For decades, basic biologgers have been used to relay physiological data including an animal's heart rate or body temperature. But now, new technologies are affording scientists a more advanced insight into the behavior of animals as they move through their natural environment undisturbed.
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North Sea offshore wind energy is becoming the most important source of energy for the Netherlands. Wind energy is clean and never runs out, except there are disadvantages for the animals in and above the sea, says Josien Steenbergen of Wageningen Marine Research. "We are studying the risks and how to reduce them."
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Coprolites (fossil feces) from around 30,000 years ago have been used to identify the presence of bearded vultures (Gypaetus barbatus) at the Paleolithic site of Lagar Velho (Portugal). A comparison of the coprolites found in the excavations with the feces of present-day lammergeyers has confirmed the presence of these animals in the past. The research study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, points out the importance of identifying the coprolites when documenting the presence of these birds in the sites and studying the relationship they had with prehistoric human communities.
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More than half of the world's population lives in cities. In Aotearoa New Zealand, the proportion of people who live in towns or cities exceeds 86%. With our lives increasingly lived in urban environments, it's vital for our personal well-being—and the planet's—that city planners find ways to foster a connection with nature.
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It is now widely accepted that birds are descended from dinosaurs. It is also understood that this transition encompasses some of the most dramatic transformations morphologically, functionally, and ecologically, thus eventually giving rise to the characteristic bird body plan.
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Since the days of Charles Darwin, evolutionary biologists have widely believed that most new species form because they've adapted to different environments—but a new University of Toronto study suggests otherwise.
Noise from urban environments found to affect the color of songbirds' beaks
in Bird Research in the Media
Posted
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