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Insects such as bees are crucial pollinators responsible for maintaining biodiversity and food security and have long been a challenge for both existing large-scale tracking methods and high-resolution imaging systems.

For the first time, scientists have used data from weather radar not to track storms, but to count birds as they travel across Australian skies.

Like people, birds have fewer friends as they age, but the reasons why are unclear. New research published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences suggests they may just have no drive to. This is a special issue of the journal on understanding age and society using natural populations.

New research from the University of Oxford has revealed that species that are more social live longer and produce offspring for a greater timespan. This is the first study on this topic which spans the animal kingdom, from jellyfish to humans.

Invasive silver carp have been spreading throughout the Mississippi River Basin since their introduction a half-century ago. Yet, try as they might, the fish have not advanced beyond a particular stretch of the Illinois River north of Kankakee. Research from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign shows the fish are likely avoiding contaminants from the Chicago Area Waterway, which flows south before petering out around...

Burmese pythons can consume prey even larger than scientists realized, according to a new study published in the journal Reptiles & Amphibians.

Why do animals actually hunt in groups when they have to share the prey afterwards? Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence (SCIoI), in which Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin) and the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) are involved, have shown in a field study in the ocean off Mexico that the faster the prey school moves, the...

Few people are fans of stink bugs, mosquitoes, or boll weevils, but insects play a key role in the circle of life that makes up the planet's environment. In fact, world-renowned biologist E. O. Wilson famously declared that if insects vanished, our environment would collapse.

Male birds help their parents less than females because they're too busy scouting for new places to live and breed, a remarkable new study shows.

Camera-trap monitoring detected only 11 individual Sumatran tigers (Panthera tigris sumatrae) and no cubs between 2020 and 2022 in the Ulu Masen Ecosystem, Sumatra Island, Indonesia, reports a paper published in Scientific Reports. The high proportion of male tigers observed suggests severe levels of poaching are taking place, highlighting the urgent need for greater monitoring and targeted protection of this critically endangered species.

The native banksias, with their colorful flowering spikes, were long thought to have been pollinated by honeyeater birds and marsupials, which are rewarded with large quantities of nectar.

For the first time ever, a team including several UC Santa Cruz scientists have directly measured the behavioral responses of some of the most common marine mammals to military sonar. And the finding that surprised them most was that these animals were sensitive to the sounds at much lower levels than previously predicted.

When research scientist Gary Longo first saw the results of his genomic analysis of sardines, he thought he must have mixed up his samples.

Fossils from more than 600,000 years ago reveal how Southern Europe's animal community shifted between warm and cold climate fluctuations, according to a study published October 23, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Beniamino Mecozzi from the Sapienza Università di Roma, Italy and colleagues.

Insects and spiders are important elements in the food webs of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. With declines in their biodiversity, the food supply for birds, fish, reptiles, amphibians and small mammals is not only becoming scarcer, but also poorer in important fatty acids, as an international research team led by scientists from Eawag and WSL has recently demonstrated.

Coral reefs worldwide are in trouble. These ecosystems support a billion people and more than a quarter of marine species. Still, many have been damaged by unsustainable fishing and tourism, coastal construction, nutrient runoff, and climate change. Now, researchers have shown that broadcasting the sounds of healthy reefs is a way to encourage larval corals to repopulate degraded sites and help revitalize them.

Tardigrades are microscopic invertebrates measuring between 0.2 mm and 1.1 mm in length. They are close relatives of arthropods (spiders, insects, crustaceans), and can live in a wide variety of environments. Yet little is known about them.

As the Arctic warms, polar bears now face a greater risk of contracting several pathogens than bears three decades ago. Karyn Rode and Caroline Van Hemert of the U.S. Geological Survey report these findings in a new study published October 23, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS ONE.

The symbiotic relationship between corals and their photosynthetic algal partners (photosymbionts) goes back at least to the Devonian (385 million years ago), a Nature paper suggests. This is important for our understanding of earlier coral reef ecosystems.

Bacteria and fungi from the wings of bats could play a significant role in saving them from white-nose syndrome (WNS), a fungal disease affecting the skin of wings and muzzle, which has nearly wiped out vulnerable bat populations across North America.

California's Channel Islands are home to the Channel Island fox (Urocyon littoralis), one of the smallest and most cherished species of island fox in the United States. Although no longer on the Endangered Species List, they remain a species of special concern due to their ecological importance.

As part of her Ph.D. research at The University of Queensland, lead investigator Dr. Samantha Reynolds, now a Research Fellow from Murdoch University's Harry Butler Institute, used three future climate change scenarios from CMIP6 climate models to investigate how ocean warming could affect the energetics and distribution of the world's largest marine ectotherm.

Animal sounds combined with artificial intelligence (AI) can revolutionize biodiversity monitoring both on land and in aquatic settings according to researchers from the University of Copenhagen. By analyzing wildlife sounds, AI can now identify species more accurately and efficiently than ever before and provide unique insights into the behaviors and habitats of animals without disturbing them.