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Some efforts to preserve or rewild natural habitats are shifting harmful land use to other parts of the world—and this could drive an even steeper decline in the planet's species, according to a team of conservation scientists and economists led by the University of Cambridge.

Over the past 60 years, marine biologists at UC Santa Cruz have monitored the behavior of northern elephant seals that journey to nearby Año Nuevo Natural Reserve. With the seals gathering on the beach by the thousands to breed and molt, generations of researchers have been able to amass more than 350,000 observations on over 50,000 seals.

In tropical forests, endangered species inside protected habitats are still in danger from threats from beyond their sanctuaries, according to a study published in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Ilaria Greco and Francesco Rovero of the University of Florence, Italy, and colleagues.

The ink of the cuttlefish could transform how sharks are deterred from hunting near swimmers, according to new research.

For fruit flies, finding the right mate is all about the right song. Now, research shows that male flies don't just try to impress their valentine by serenading her with song—they also go to great lengths to drown out the competition. By jamming their rivals' love songs with high-frequency wing flicks, male fruit flies boost the chances that they'll win the female over.

Jumping spiders—one of the largest spider families—get their name from the extraordinary jumps they make to hunt prey, to navigate and also to evade predators.

Crocodiles in northern Australia are heating up as the climate warms, with higher body temperatures changing their behavior.

Researchers from the Cluster of Excellence Collective Behavior have introduced the method YOLO-Behaviour: a new computer vision framework to automatically identify animal behaviors from videos. The robust and easy-to-use tool lowers the barrier of entry for biologists who would like to automate data collection using novel AI technologies.

Pesticides are causing overwhelming negative effects on hundreds of species of microbes, fungi, plants, insects, fish, birds and mammals that they are not intended to harm—and globally their use is a major contributor to the biodiversity crisis.

Researchers have unveiled new insights into how weather influences the spread of dengue fever. Their study identifies temperature and rainfall as critical factors driving the global surge in dengue cases and offers actionable strategies for mitigating the disease's impact.

Observing animal behavior in a laboratory offers a controlled environment, but these model organisms can behave differently in the wild. An Osaka Metropolitan University-led research team that uses medaka in the lab has now clarified certain aspects of how these fish live in their natural environment.

A new study from researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill provides the first empirical evidence that loggerhead sea turtles can learn and remember the unique magnetic signatures of different geographic regions. This discovery offers new insights into how turtles and other migratory animals navigate vast distances to reach specific foraging and breeding grounds. The findings, published in the journal Nature,...

Just as the human body serves as a habitat for bacteria and other microbes, diverse, tiny organisms known as protists host their own microbiomes.

The U.K. has 4 million more dogs than previously estimated, with regional hotspots in Telford, Darlington and Harrogate, new research shows.

Expanding aquaculture in the Amazon could provide nutritional and economic benefits at a fraction of the environmental cost of cattle grazing, according to a paper in Nature Sustainability from Cornell researchers and colleagues in the U.S. and Brazil. Such expansion could also come with risks, especially the potential introduction of harmful non-native species, the paper finds.

A new study led by Prof. Adi Torfstein from the Hebrew University and Prof. Oren Levy from Bar-Ilan University, in collaboration with an international team of researchers, has uncovered a significant pause in coral reef growth in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba, northern Red Sea, during the late Holocene period.

Marmalade hoverflies leave northern Europe each autumn to escape the cold winter. A study, by the University of Exeter, compared the number of males and females migrating at a northern point (Denmark) and further south (Spain).

Nature is full of impostors, and many of them are found in the insect world. Certain species, such as the bee fly or the ant spider, are experts at misdirection and their ability to confuse predators or prey is on a par with that of John Travolta in Face/Off and Arya Stark in Game of Thrones. However, never before has a blow fly been...

Schools of fish are mesmerizing examples of collective animal behavior. Thousands of individuals move in near-perfect synchrony, despite each fish having only a limited view of their surroundings. How do they achieve such effortless coordination with minimal local information? And what visual cues does an individual fish actually perceive within the shifting, dynamic group?

Researchers from the Qingdao Institute of Bioenergy and Bioprocess Technology (QIBEBT) and the Institute of Oceanology, both under the Chinese Academy of Sciences, have discovered new insights into how marine organisms adapt to extreme deep-sea environments.

A study from Tel Aviv University, the first of its kind on mammals, has found that bats living in urban environments give birth, on average, about 2.5 weeks earlier than bats living in rural areas. The researchers attribute this difference in birthing times between the city and the countryside to more favorable temperatures and greater food abundance in urban areas. Bats are mammals, making...

Dinoflagellates play crucial roles in aquatic ecosystems, particularly as major contributors to harmful algal blooms. They can enter a dormant stage, known as the resting cyst stage, that allows them to survive for extended periods—up to 150 years—in marine sediments. This dormancy is essential for their annual population dynamics, blooming cycles, and geographic expansion.

Killer whales are the only natural predator of baleen whales—those that have "baleen" in their mouths to sieve their plankton diet from the water. More solitary than toothed whales, baleen whales face predatory attacks from killer whales, especially mother and calf pairs. When attacked, some species fight back, while others choose flight.

Biodiversity is under threat worldwide. While the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) estimated in 2019 that 1 million out of 8 million species are threatened with extinction, more recent studies put the figure at twice as high: 2 million animal and plant species are therefore on the brink of extinction unless something is done quickly to change their living conditions.