By Dan Radel 31 July 2019 (Asbury Park Press) – Blink and you’ll miss one. Collecting fireflies is a childhood memory that many of us share. Their glowing lights begin to appear in the twilight around the time school ends each year, signaling the start of summer vacation. But is the fire going out? Researchers and advocates say the insect is […]
By Patrick Barkham 22 August 2019 (The Guardian) – An exotic plant has produced male and female cones outdoors in Britain for what is believed to be the first time in 60 million years. Botanists say the event is a sign of global heating. Two cycads (Cycas revoluta), a type of primitive tree that dominated […]
By Adam Voiland 16 August 2019 (NASA) – In the Amazon rainforest, fire season has arrived. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite captured these images of several fires burning in the states of Rondônia, Amazonas, Pará, and Mato Grosso on August 11 and August 13, 2019. In the Amazon region, fires are rare for much […]
By Meghan Walker 15 August 2019 (My Ballard) – The number of sockeye salmon passing through the Ballard Locks Fish Ladder is at all-time low, according to yearly counts dating back to the 1970s. According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s daily count, just 18,000 sockeye have been counted at the fish ladder during […]
By Scott Bronstein, Curt Devine, Drew Griffin, and Ashley Hackett 9 August 2019 (CNN) – The Environmental Protection Agency told staff scientists that it was no longer opposing a controversial Alaska mining project that could devastate one of the world’s most valuable wild salmon fisheries just one day after President Trump met with Alaska’s governor, […]
By Nadja Neumann 8 August 2019 (IGB) – Rivers and lakes cover just about one percent of Earth’s surface, but are home to one third of all vertebrate species worldwide. At the same time, freshwater life is highly threatened. Scientists from the Leibniz-Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries (IGB) and international colleagues have now […]
By Philip M. Fearnside 29 July 2019 (Mongabay) – Brazil’s Amazonian deforestation in June 2019 was 88 percent greater than for the same month in 2018, and deforestation in the first half of July was 68 percent above that for the entire month of July in 2018. There is no reason to question INPE’s current deforestation numbers from the DETER (Detection […]
By Hayley Dunning 30 April 2019 (Imperial College London) – Bees exposed to a neonicotinoid pesticide fly only a third of the distance that unexposed bees are able to achieve. Flight behaviour is crucial for determining how bees forage, so reduced flight performance from pesticide exposure could lead to colonies going hungry and pollination services […]
By Olivia Prentzel 18 July 2019 (National Geographic) – For every lion in the wild, there are 14 African elephants, and there are 15 Western lowland gorillas. There are more rhinos than lions, too. The iconic species has disappeared from 94 percent of its historic range, which once included almost the entire African continent but […]
By Stephanie Wood 18 July 2019 (National Observer) – The federal government has turned down an emergency recommendation from scientists to use a federal law to protect endangered trout that live along the path of the existing Trans Mountain oil pipeline and its expansion project. The decision — described by one First Nations chief, Lee […]
