Topic
The study and protection of wild species and ecosystems, including population trends, disease threats, genetic diversity, and conservation interventions.
Bogong moths are swarming across Australia again, nearly a decade after drought, pesticides and habitat loss cut their numbers by an estimated 99.5%. The return rests on sightings, and its likely cause, wetter weather, faces a severe El Nino this summer.
Reality
Researchers from eight countries reviewed hundreds of studies and found vertebrates use insects as medicine, shelter and bait as well as food. Their Nature Reviews Biodiversity paper says studies of insect decline rarely count anything beyond lost food.
Reality
A Science Advances study of more than 5,800 chromosome-scale assemblies places animal genomes in a single coordinate system. The mechanism it leans on cannot be reversed.
Reality
A PNAS team sampled about 700 soils from seven undisturbed forest plots between the Tibetan Plateau and Thailand's lowlands, and found nematode diversity tracking plant turnover, with body width predicting how communities assemble.
Reality
DNA from a 190-year-old type specimen in London settles which name the Himalayan pangolin carries. Species-level matching of trafficked scales gets easier; region-level tracing does not, yet.
Reality