By Rong-Gong Lin II and Javier Panzar 5 August 2018 (Los Angeles Times) – At Scripps Pier in San Diego, the surface water reached the highest temperature in 102 years of records, 78.8 degrees.Palm Springs had its warmest July on record, with an average of 97.4 degrees. Death Valley experienced its hottest month on record, […]
By Cheryl Katz 25 July 2018 (Hakai Magazine) – Plastics, those indestructible relics of our throwaway culture, are omnipresent in the oceans, making their way into everything from sea salt to seabirds. Now, a new study finds seabirds may be giving back, shuttling particles from ocean garbage gyres back to shore in their poop. Around […]
By Taran Volckhausen 21 June 2018 (Mongabay) – The large-scale expansion of oil palm has been a major driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in many areas of the tropics. In Malaysia and Indonesia, where 85 percent of the world’s oil palm is cultivated, rampant industry growth over the past several decades has replaced rainforest […]
By Dipika Kadaba 21 May 2018 (The Revelator) – Humans increasingly live in a world of constant artificial lighting — so much so that it’s easy to forget about the environmental consequences of light pollution. “Light is a symbol of urbanity that changes the experience of any landscape from a human perspective,” says Travis Longcore, […]
By Jeanfreddy Gutiérrez Torres 21 May 2018 LAKE MARACAIBO, Venezuela (Mongabay) – The wildlife of Venezuela, one of 17 countries that account for 70 percent of the world’s biodiversity, has come under new pressure in addition to deforestation, toxic oil spills. and illegal trafficking: human starvation.The economic crisis that began in 2014 with the collapse […]
By Jenny Staletovich 3 March 2018 MIAMI (Miami Herald) – The grasshopper sparrow, a tiny Florida prairie bird perched on the verge of extinction for the last decade, may have encountered a final, unconquerable foe: an invasive new disease quickly killing off its young. The disease has spread so rapidly that wildlife managers now fear […]
By John W. Fitzpatrick and Nathan R. Senner 27 April 2018 (The New York Times) – A worldwide catastrophe is underway among an extraordinary group of birds — the marathon migrants we know as shorebirds. Numbers of some species are falling so quickly that many biologists fear an imminent planet-wide wave of extinctions. These declines […]
By Seth Borenstein 16 April 2018 (PhysOrg) – Global warming is screwing up nature’s intricately timed dinner hour, often making hungry critters and those on the menu show up at much different times, a new study shows.Timing is everything in nature. Bees have to be around and flowers have to bloom at the same time […]
By Brandon Keim 14 March 2018 (Anthropocene) – No guild of North American birds is declining so rapidly as aerial insectivores: acrobatic marvels whose maneuvers make our hearts soar, and who provide a vital ecosystem service. Why are their numbers plummeting? A leading explanation is a widespread decline in insect populations — a troubling possibility, […]
20 March 2018 (AFP) – Bird populations across the French countryside have fallen by a third over the last decade and a half, researchers have said. Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies – one national in scope and the other […]
