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Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Are poachers rhinos only problem | Rhinos dont have it easy these days. Usually, they roam Two rhino species live in Kruger Park - white and black large areas in Africa and Eurasia. Now they occur almost only rhino. One curious finding is that each of them suffers from in protected areas due to poaching (forbidden hunting) and the drought in a different... | Unrelenting poaching to feed the illegal trafficking of rhinoceros (rhino) horn remains the principle threat to the persistence of south-central black and southern white rhino that live in the Kruger National Park (Kruger), South Africa. Other global environmental change drivers, such as unpredictable climatic conditio... | https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0209678 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Can microbes make fruit flies stronger | Have you ever thought of yourself as an ecosystem? Or Humans are not unique in having microbiomes! Insects - like even, a planet, hosting trillions of inhabitants! If not, get fruit flies - also host microbial communities. We examined used to the fact that you are one! Each and every one of the microbiomes of different... | In Drosophila, diet is considered a prominent factor shaping the associated bacterial community. However, the host population background (e.g. genotype, geographical origin and founder effects) is a factor that may also exert a significant influence and is often overlooked. To test for population background effects, we... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167726 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Can we save rhinos from extinction | In the past decade, poachers have increasingly hunted and this endangered species. We found that there is a way to killed South African white rhinoceroses, despite efforts to save rhinos from extinction but it requires combating the protect them. If the killing continues at this rate, these international mafias that bu... | The onslaught on the Worlds wildlife continues despite numerous initiatives aimed at curbing it. We build a model that integrates rhino horn trade with rhino population dynamics in order to evaluate the impact of various management policies on rhino sustainability. In our model, an agent-based sub-model of horn trade f... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0167040 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Could this be a concrete solution to biodiversity loss | Did you know that in some parts of the world, we have for marine organisms. replaced over half of our natural shorelines with man-made We wanted to find out what effect creating artificial rock coastal defences? pools on these structures would have. Would it help to attract This is important because these structures ar... | In coastal habitats artificial structures typically support lower biodiversity and can support greater numbers of non-native and opportunistic species than natural rocky reefs. Eco-engineering experiments are typically trialed to succeed; but arguably as much is learnt from failure than from success. Our goal was to tr... | http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/094015/meta | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Counting the fish catch why dont the numbers match | Fish and marine animals like shrimp (well call them all fish This made us realize that catches peaked at a much here), are an important food source for many people in the higher amount than the officially reported figures. It also world. They provide vital nutrients to people with poor diets. showed us that they are no... | Here we reply to a commentary by Ye et al. (Mar. Policy 2017; Ye et al.) on our article (Pauly and Zeller, 2017 [2]) commenting on FAO's interpretation of current fisheries trends in SOFIA 2016 (The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture). We show how arguments such as FAO's catch statistics being the best they can p... | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10244 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Do bats benefit from wildfires | Did you know that there are more than 1,000 species of bats? Theyre also the only mammals that can fly! These amazing animals are well adapted to life in the forest, but what happens when wildfires hit their homes? We wanted to find out how wildfires in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California affect bats. We looked a... | Wildfire is an important ecological process that influences species occurrence and biodiversity generally. Its effect on bats is understudied, creating challenges for habitat management and species conservation as threats to the taxa worsen globally and within fire-prone ecosystems. We conducted acoustic surveys of wil... | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-52875-2 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Do bees get the flu | Do bees scare you? Instead of fearing them, you should the viral load (virus concentration in the bees body) was appreciate their role in our ecosystem. In addition to low. We infected two wild bee species with high doses of providing us honey, they are responsible for pollinating viruses, and they didnt get sick immed... | Evidence of inter-species pathogen transmission from managed to wild bees has sparked concern that emerging diseases could be causing or exacerbating wild bee declines. While some pathogens, like RNA viruses, have been found in pollen and wild bees, the threat these viruses pose to wild bees is largely unknown. Here, w... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166190 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Do fish have a home | Do you have a favorite place? One that makes you feel safe fish populations from decreasing. and has everything you need to survive? Now imagine you We tracked European bass (an important fish in Europe) for are in your favorite place and a skunk wanders in. You run a year to figure out where their favorite places were... | The European bass (Dicentrarchus labrax) support high value commercial and recreational fisheries, however the Spawning Stock Biomass (SSB) of the northern Atlantic stock (ICES divisions 4.bc, 7.a, and 7.dh) has rapidly declined to an unsustainable level. The decline in SSB has been attributed to high fishing pressure ... | https://academic.oup.com/icesjms/article/78/9/3121/6370941 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Do northern trees have cold feet about climate change | Imagine living in an area where it starts getting uncomfortably hot. Would you and your family just pack up and move somewhere else to be more comfortable? Unlike people, trees cannot escape to other climates quickly when temperatures rise as a result of global climate change. Will they suffer when it gets hotter? Or w... | The growth response of trees to ongoing climate change has important implications for future forest dynamics, accurate carbon accounting, and sustainable forest management. We used data from black spruce (Picea mariana) and jack pine (Pinus banksiana) provenance trials, along with published data for three other norther... | http://www.nature.com/articles/srep43881 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Evolution in action Are voles shrinking | It is not easy being small. Especially when nature seems to causes, we separated genetic and environmental influences favor larger individuals. But why dont all animals evolve to on vole body size. be bigger? Is it sometimes better to be small? Or are some We found that young voles with genes for small bodies incapable... | In natural populations, quantitative trait dynamics often do not appear to follow evolutionary predictions. Despite abundant examples of natural selection acting on heritable traits, conclusive evidence for contemporary adaptive evolution remains rare for wild vertebrate populations, and phenotypic stasis seems to be t... | http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.1002592 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can black rats change the behavior of reef fish | Every animal needs an environment where it can survive and thus reduce their population. So, the amount of nutrients thrive. Unfortunately, humans are having a serious impact reaching the coral reefs also decreases. on the natural world. Our behavior can harm ecosystems Coral reef fish need lots of energy from their fo... | Human-induced environmental changes, such as the introduction of invasive species, are driving declines in the movement of nutrients across ecosystems with negative consequences for ecosystem function. Declines in nutrient inputs could thus have knock-on effects at higher trophic levels and broader ecological scales, y... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01931-8 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can cheetahs and farmers get along better | Sometimes humans and animals come into conflict with each other. This can threaten peoples livelihoods and also threaten the animals lives. In central Namibia, farmers have a problem with cheetahs. The cheetahs prey on their baby cows (calves). In turn, the farmers often try to kill the wild cats in order to protect th... | Significance The cheetah is a prominent example for humancarnivore conflicts and mitigation challenges. Its global population suffered a substantial decline throughout its range. Here, we present an in-depth and new understanding of the socio-spatial organization of the cheetah. We show that cheetahs maintain a network... | https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2002487117 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can leopard seals survive climate change | Have you ever been by yourself and needed to get something at variability in the traits and behaviors of polar predators to off a high shelf, but couldnt reach? Now imagine you had assess how they will adapt to climate change. your whole class with you. Its likely that someone in your We tagged and studied a population... | Animals that display plasticity in behavioral, ecological, and morphological traits are better poised to cope with environmental disturbances. Here, we examined individual plasticity and intraspecific variation in the morphometrics, movement patterns, and dive behavior of an enigmatic apex predator, the leopard seal (H... | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2022.976019/full | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | How can offshore mussel farms help to repair the ocean | Lots of people around the world love eating seafood! Unfortunately, some fishing practices harm seafloor habitats. Is there a way to enjoy resources from the ocean and help the environment at the same time? Mussels are a kind of shellfish that can be farmed at sea and collected for food. They grow in clumps, which may ... | The United Kingdom's first large-scale, offshore, long-line mussel farm deployed its first ropes in 2013 in Lyme Bay, southwest United Kingdom, located in an area of seabed that was heavily degraded due to historic bottom-towed fishing. It was hypothesised that due to the artificial structures that accumulate mussels a... | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aff2.77 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can oyster farms create homes for fish | Fish are fascinating animals. Individual fish have places they watch their behaviors. Environmental DNA helped us find call home as well as their own daily routines. We wanted to the species that are hard to see on camera, like very small find out whether oyster cages (gear used to farm oysters) or nocturnal fish. prov... | Multi-tiered oyster aquaculture cages may provide habitat for fish assemblages sim- ilar to natural structured seafloor. Methods were developed to assess fish assemblages associatedwith aquaculture gear and boulder habitat using underwater video census combined with envi-ronmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding. Action camer... | https://www.int-res.com/articles/aei2021/13/q013p277.pdf | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can polar bears survive longer in a changing climate | Polar bears are decreasing in number because of climate fjords. They use ice from glaciers as well as sea ice to hunt. change. Polar bears depend on Arctic sea ice to hunt for their We conducted a study looking at their movement, genetics, food. In a warming climate, sea ice is disappearing. Because and demography. We ... | Polar bears are susceptible to climate warming because of their dependence on sea ice, which is declining rapidly. We present the first evidence for a genetically distinct and functionally isolated group of polar bears in Southeast Greenland. These bears occupy sea-ice conditions resembling those projected for the High... | https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/science.abk2793 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can protecting lobsters be good for fishermen | Millions of animals, plants, and other organisms live in the they will lose their jobs and cannot provide fish for people to eat. ocean. Humans rely on marine ecosystems for seafood and Our study shows this worry is not necessarily true. Protecting other resources. Fishing is important, but if fishermen are not the mar... | Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are designed to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services. Some MPAs are also established to benefit fisheries through increased egg and larval production, or the spillover of mobile juveniles and adults. Whether spillover influences fishery landings depend on the population status and m... | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-82371-5 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How can vultures and wind farms co-exist | Imagine how it would feel to fly through the sky on wings so We collected data on existing and proposed wind farms in wide, when you catch some rising warm air you soar for miles! south-eastern Europe, and compared them with data on the This is how vultures fly as they look out for their next meal. areas that cinereous... | Wind farm development can combat climate change but may also threaten bird populations persistence through collision with wind turbine blades if such development is improperly planned strategically and cumulatively. Such improper planning may often occur. Numerous wind farms are planned in a region hosting the only cin... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172685 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we help improve human-elephant conflict | When humans and wildlife share the same areas, they can To understand more about these types of conflict, we did come into conflict over resources. This is called human- interviews with rural people in Myanmar. The results of this wildlife conflict. This can be a big problem when the study will help wildlife managers f... | Human-wildlife conflict has direct and indirect consequences for human communities. Understanding how both types of conflict affect communities is crucial to developing comprehensive and sustainable mitigation strategies. We conducted an interview survey of 381 participants in two rural areas in Myanmar where communiti... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253784 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Social-Science Articles | How can we keep our mountains healthy | Mountains are places people often go to visit and enjoy themselves. But mountains are also complex ecosystems that provide diverse resources, such as food, water, and energy, for over half the population worldwide! Without mountains, our normal everyday life would not be sustainable for long. Unfortunately, there are m... | Mountain social-ecological systems (MtSES) are vital to humanity, providing ecosystem services to over half the planet's human population. Despite their importance, there has been no global assessment of threats to MtSES, even as they face unprecedented challenges to their sustainability. With survey data from 57 MtSES... | https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2018EF001024 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we make sure to catch only the fish we want to eat | How much do you think seafood is worth? Would it surprise solutions! you to know that the worlds seafood market was worth We wanted to find out whether we could use lights to over $ billion in ?! And its not just money. billion make gillnet fishing better. Could using illuminated nets people (over / of the worlds popul... | Small-scale fisheries are vital for food security, nutrition, and livelihoods in coastal areas throughout the worlds oceans As intricately linked social-ecological systems, small-scale fisheries require management approaches that help ensure both ecological and socioeconomic sustainability. Given their ease of use and ... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960982221017371 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we protect fish better | People love eating fish, fishing for them, and seeing them underwater while snorkeling or diving. In fact, fish provide billions of dollars to the U.S. (and world) economy each year. Unfortunately, overfishing has depleted many fish populations. How can we protect them better, to ensure sustainable fisheries that keep ... | Managed reef fish in the Atlantic Ocean of the southeastern United States (SEUS) support a multi-billion dollar industry. There is a broad interest in locating and protecting spawning fish from harvest, to enhance productivity and reduce the potential for overfishing. We assessed spatiotemporal cues for spawning for si... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0172968 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we protect valuable marine habitats for fisheries | Have you ever wondered where the fish you eat comes from? Many fisheries all over the world are declining and need protection. But it is hard. Fishery species dont stay in one place. In fact, many fishery species use many habitats over their lifetime. Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) can help protect marine ecosystems and... | Fisheries are in decline worldwide, and Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are being advocated as tools that can not only protect and restore biodiversity but also improve fisheries sustainability and protect fisher livelihoods. To understand the role of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) in underpinning commercial fisheries, th... | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/fme.12571 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we protect wildlife through ecotourism | Many countries try to use ecotourism as a tool for wildlife conservation, hoping that the increased income for local people will make them value wildlife more. But this strategy is not always as successful as conservationists have hoped. This is why we wanted to test a new model: what if the amount of money local peopl... | Ecotourism as a strategy for achieving biodiversity conservation often results in limited conservation impact relative to its investment and revenue return. In cases where an ecotourism strategy has been used, projects are frequently criticized for not providing sufficient evidence on how the strategy has reduced threa... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0186133 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How can we quickly assess the status of eagles | Can you predict how a movie will end by looking only at And we are glad we did, because we found that they are a couple of snapshots from some early scenes? Thats not reliable. Commonly used measures like how many what many ecologists have to do to quickly assess birds are able to breed and how young birds are when whe... | The development of snapshot metrics that can serve as reliable diagnostic tools for rapidly assessing population status has great appeal. We used stochastic simulation modeling and recursive partitioning to evaluate the reliability of two proposed snapshot metrics in territorial raptors: the floater/breeder ratio and t... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0006320717305116 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we reduce the impact of fishing | How many times do you think you have eaten fish this year? Fish is delicious and its really good for you, but we need to make sure that we dont over-fish our seas and oceans (Fig. ). That way there are enough fish left to feed us for all the years to come. We propose three simple rules for fisheries management, which w... | Minimizing the impact of fishing is an explicit goal in international agreements as well as in regional directives and national laws. To assist in practical implementation, three simple rules for fisheries management are proposed in this study: 1) take less than nature by ensuring that mortality caused by fishing is le... | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/faf.12146/abstract | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we track life in the ocean | Have you ever tried to count all the different species in a pond? Its very hard, especially when you try to find all the tiny animals hiding among the weeds. Now, imagine if you wanted to count all the species in the sea! Scientists struggle to monitor life in the ocean because it is so vast and deep. Yet, we need to k... | Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis allows the simultaneous examination of organisms across multiple trophic levels and domains of life, providing critical information about the complex biotic interactions related to ecosystem change. Here we used multilocus amplicon sequencing of eDNA to survey biodiversity from an... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14105-1.pdf | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do bees choose what to eat | Hard working bees play a crucial role in our ecosystem, and fats. We tested three types of pollen to see if they help helping plants reproduce. They are also vital for us they bees grow. We then gave the bees a choice between the help produce a lot of our food! Bees have a special menu of three types of natural pollen ... | Honey bee workers (Apis mellifera) consume a variety of pollens to meet the majority of their requirements for protein and lipids. Recent work indicates that honey bees prefer diets that reflect the proper ratio of nutrients necessary for optimal survival and homeostasis. This idea relies on the precept that honey bees... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191050 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do corals spread in the deep sea | Did you know that more people have been on the moon than We used clever genetic analysis to unlock information to the very bottom of the sea? Science is hard to do at such hidden in the corals DNA and found that this was true for depths, which is a problem for deep sea animals its hard to one species, but not for the o... | Ecological processes in the deep sea are poorly understood due to the logistical constraints of sampling thousands of metres below the oceans surface and remote from most land masses. Under such circumstances, genetic data provides unparalleled insight into biological and ecological relationships. We use microsatell... | https://www.nature.com/articles/srep46103 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do dams affect fish populations | Hydroelectric dams look like barriers between bodies of water, where fish on one side of the dam live and breed without interacting with fish on the other side. We wanted to know how a Winnipeg River dam, the Slave Falls Generating Station (GS), had actually impacted a long-lived fish, the Lake Sturgeon (Acipenser fulv... | Many hydroelectric dams have been in place for 50 - >100 years, which for most fish species means that enough generations have passed for fragmentation induced divergence to have accumulated. However, for long-lived species such as Lake Sturgeon, Acipenser fulvescens, it should be possible to discriminate between histo... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0174269 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do deep-sea hot spring ecosystems work | We have all heard that living creatures need the sun to survive, either directly through photosynthesis or by consuming biomass produced by photosynthesis. But is this really true for all of them? Some organisms survive in the deep sea where there is no sunlight using energy from our planet instead of our sun in a pr... | The existence of a chemosynthetic subseafloor biosphere was immediately recognized when deep-sea hot springs were discovered in 1977. However, quantifying how much new carbon is fixed in this environment has remained elusive. In this study, we incubated natural subseafloor communities under in situ pressure/temperature... | http://www.pnas.org/content/115/26/6756 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do dogs make trouble for wildlife in the Andes | What do pets and wild animals have in common? Some pets like dogs, for instance can easily turn back into wild animals when abandoned or let loose. This is especially true for places where people lack resources or education to properly take care of their pets. Right now, we have over 1 billion feral (wild) dogs roami... | Although the Andes have long been occupied by people, habitat loss, fragmentation through deforestation, and other human activities such as introduction of invasive species have increased drastically during the past century. The Ecuadorian Andes are considered a biodiversity hotspot. However, the fauna and threats to t... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192346 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | How do nutrients change flowering in prairies | Farmers today apply more synthetic fertilizers to farm fields Do they all just grow better? Or could there be any negative than ever before but not all of these nutrients are used by side effects? To answer these questions, we systematically crops: some fertilizer escapes through the air, soil, or water. added nutrient... | The distribution of flowering across the growing season is governed by each species evolutionary history and climatic variability. However, global change factors, such as eutrophication and invasion, can alter plant community composition and thus change the distribution of flowering across the growing season. We examin... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0178440 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How do oil spills impact fiddler crabs | Crude oil which is used to make gasoline, fuel oils, asphalt, We analyzed data collected by five different studies over a and some plastic products can be toxic for many coastal and -year period in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon marine animals and plants when spilled in the environment. oil spill. We sa... | TheDeepwater Horizonoil spill was the largest marine oil spill in US waters to date and one of the largest worldwide. Impacts of this spill on salt marsh vegetation have been well documented, although impacts on marsh macroinvertebrates have received less attention. To examine impacts of the oil spill on an important m... | https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12237-016-0072-6 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do our outdoor activities impact wildlife | Do you love seeing wildlife when youre wandering around in are common, but capercaillie are on the brink of extinction in the woods? Like a majestic deer, or a beautiful bird? Well, the that area. love might not be very mutual. In fact, many animals avoid us, We found that both red deer and capercaillie avoided hiking ... | The rapid spread and diversification of outdoor recreation can impact on wildlife in various ways, often leading to the avoidance of disturbed habitats. To mitigate human-wildlife conflicts, spatial zonation schemes can be implemented to separate human activities from key wildlife habitats, e.g., by designating undistu... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175134#pone.0175134.ref011 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Pollution Articles | How do pesticides get into honey | Honey is natures sweetest gift. But did you know that honey Since , the European Union banned neonicotinoids may contain pesticides? Farmers use pesticides to kill pests in flowering crops that bees visit. We wanted to know that harm their crops. But pesticides also hurt honey bees how effective this policy was. Does U... | Due to concerns over negative impacts on insect pollinators, the European Union has implemented a moratorium on the use of three neonicotinoid pesticide seed dressings for mass-flowering crops. We assessed the effectiveness of this policy in reducing the exposure risk to honeybees by collecting 130 samples of honey fro... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0189681 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | How do plants keep in touch | If someone behind you tapped you on the shoulder, your first response would probably be to turn around. All living organisms respond to stimuli, and plants are no exception to this rule. Since they cannot turn around, though, how would they respond to light contact with neighboring plants? Are plants in touch with thei... | In natural habitats plants can be exposed to brief and light contact with neighbouring plants. This mechanical stimulus may represent a cue that induces responses to nearby plants. However, little is known about the effect of touching on plant growth and interaction with insect herbivores. To simulate contact between p... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165742 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do seabirds share | Imagine you and your friends are working together on a project for art class. But theres a problem. You only have one pencil for each color needed to complete it. Uh-oh! Each of you wants to start with yellow, so what do you do? Argue over the yellow pencil? Or divide the pencils so one person starts with yellow, while... | Sympatric species must sufficiently differentiate aspects of their ecological niche to alleviate complete interspecific competition and stably coexist within the same area. Seabirds provide a unique opportunity to understand patterns of niche segregation among coexisting species because they form large multi-species co... | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-81583-z | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How do woodpeckers choose where to nest | Many human activities disturb the natural habitats of various species. This is why it is very important for wildlife managers to determine and protect high-quality habitats, which are habitats the most reproductively successful individuals choose. When it comes to breeding birds, researchers usually identify habitat by... | Despite the prevalent use of nest-site selection studies to define habitat quality for birds, many studies relying on use-availability analysis have found poor correlations between selected vegetation and reproductive success. Using 3 years of data from northeastern British Columbia (20072009), we determined timing of ... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203683 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does climate change affect the Great Lakes | Scientists agree that some human activities, like burning the sediments. From these samples, we could see that the fossil fuels, cause the Earths atmosphere to trap more amount of algae in Lake Superior has slowly increased over heat, leading to climate change. We wanted to find out time. However, in the past hundred y... | Anthropogenic climate change has the potential to alter many facets of Earths freshwater resources, especially lacustrine ecosystems. The effects of anthropogenic changes in Lake Superior, which is Earths largest freshwater lake by area, are not well documented (spatially or temporally) and predicted future states in r... | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15713 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does climate change make fish late for dinner | Imagine you are a young and hungry fish looking for food Now imagine someone turning up the heat (like we humans in an estuary (the part of a river where it meets the ocean). are doing by changing the climate). Could the rising water You need to grow big and strong before you migrate to the temperatures mess up the tim... | Alterations of species phenology in response to climate change are now unquestionable. Until now, most studies have reported precocious occurrence of life cycle events as a major phenological response. Desynchronizations of biotic interactions, in particular predator-prey relationships, are however assumed to strongly ... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0173752 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | How does reducing air pollution help birds | When you think of pollution, what image comes to mind? Litter? Oil spills? We think of these types of pollution first because they are visible. But the most dangerous form is one that we cannot see: air pollution. We know that chemicals and small particles in the air can harm human health, so governments create laws an... | Massive wildlife losses over the past 50 y have brought new urgency to identifying both the drivers of population decline and potential solutions. We provide large-scale evidence that air pollution, specifically ozone, is associated with declines in bird abundance in the United States. We show that an air pollution reg... | https://www.pnas.org/content/117/49/30900 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Social-Science Articles | How does rock climbing impact birds | Do you enjoy exploring the great outdoors? Hiking and different directions (north, east, west, and south). Half of the camping are great ways to connect with nature. Lately, cliffs are visited by lots of climbers and half by very few or another outdoor activity, rock climbing, has become very no climbers. We compared t... | As the sport of outdoor rock climbing rapidly grows, there is increasing pressure to understand how it can affect communities of organisms in cliff habitats. To that end, we surveyed 32 cliff sites in Boulder, Colorado, USA, and assessed the relative roles of human recreation and natural habitat features as drivers of ... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0209557 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How does sunscreen make corals sick | Picture yourself diving into a tropical ocean. The sun is bright, and the water is clear and warm. What do you see? Colorful fish, playful dolphins, waving seaweed? Maybe you even see something that looks like a beautiful underwater garden a coral reef! Coral reefs are important habitats for a huge diversity of animal... | The reported toxicity of oxybenzone-based sunscreens to corals has raised concerns about the impacts of ecotourist-shed sunscreens on corals already weakened by global stressors. However, oxybenzones toxicity mechanism(s) are not understood, hampering development of safer sunscreens. We found that oxybenzone caused hig... | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abn2600 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | How does war affect gorillas | The Grauers gorilla is one of two subspecies of the Eastern park rangers and found that the global population had gorilla. The whole population of Grauers gorilla lives in the decreased by % since . There are now only , forests of eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) individuals left. in Central Africa. This ... | Grauers gorilla (Gorilla beringei graueri), the Worlds largest primate, is confined to eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and is threatened by civil war and insecurity. During the war, armed groups in mining camps relied on hunting bushmeat, including gorillas. Insecurity and the presence of several militia gro... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/comments?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0162697 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How much ocean should we protect | If you closed your eyes, spun a globe, and then randomly human-made climate change. However, we do far too little to placed your finger on the map, where do you think you protect these gifts. We wanted to know how much ocean we would land? Did you know that your finger would be much must protect in order to safeguard i... | We provide updated estimates of the change of oceanheat content and the thermosteric component of sea levelchange of the 0700 and 02000 m layers of the WorldOcean for 19552010. Our estimates are based on historicaldata not previously available, additional modern data, andbathythermograph data corrected for instrumental... | https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12247 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | How special do you have to be to live in acidic soil | While you are reading this, special alliances are being containing AM fungi along an acidity gradient in Japan. We formed underground invisible to the human eye. But also exposed fungi from two soils of different pH (acidic/ they are crucial to plants, and help them conquer extreme neutral) to changes in their soils ac... | Soil acidity is a major constraint on plant productivity. Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi support plant colonization in acidic soil, but soil acidity also constrains fungal growth and diversity. Fungi in extreme environments generally evolve towards specialists, suggesting that AM fungi in acidic soil are acidic-soil... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0165035 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How will climate change affect Arctic birds | Peregrine falcons are famous for their super-fast diving summer and winter habitats to the computer prediction. flights. But thats not the only thing that theyre good at. We found that summer habitats (where the birds breed) Peregrines are also world travelers! We tracked peregrine are shrinking, while winter habitats ... | Millions of migratory birds occupy seasonally favourable breeding grounds in the Arctic1, but we know little about the formation, maintenance and future of the migration routes of Arctic birds and the genetic determinants of migratory distance. Here we established a continental-scale migration system that used satellit... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03265-0 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | How will dragonflies adapt to a warmer Earth | The Earth is getting warmer, and we can already see dragonflies living in warm climates to dragonflies living in problems from it. Floods, storms, and deserts are all getting cooler climates. worse. People, animals, and plants all have to make changes We found that male dragonflies living in warmer climates if we want ... | Adaptation to different climates fuels the origins and maintenance of biodiversity. Detailing how organisms optimize fitness for their local climates is therefore an essential goal in biology. Although we increasingly understand how survival-related traits evolve as organisms adapt to climatic conditions, it is unclear... | https://www.pnas.org/content/118/28/e2101458118 | Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Is Antarctica losing its penguins | Why is Antarctica called the frozen continent? Because it populations. We monitored a colony (large group) in is ICY! The majority of the land, including the South Pole the northernmost region of the continent. For years, is covered with ice. There are even sheets of ice on the we kept track of adults and juveniles (yo... | Predicting population responses in changing environments is an important task for ecologists. In polar regions, climate warming, loss of sea ice, and more frequent anomalous events suggest that further reductions in ice-dependent animal populations are likely. We assess the risk of near-term (30-year) depletion of an A... | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecs2.1666/full | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Is climate change shrinking our fish | Imagine you are rushing home and need to breathe harder fish also need more oxygen in warmer waters. So with the and harder, but there is less oxygen in the air around you. higher demand and the lower supply of oxygen, the growth This is the situation most marine fish are facing with warmer of the fish gills (their bre... | One of the main expected responses of marine fishes to ocean warming is decrease in body size, as supported by evidence from empirical data and theoretical modeling. The theoretical underpinning for fish shrinking is that the oxygen supply to large fish size cannot be met by their gills, whose surface area cannot keep ... | https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate1691 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Is the Amazon rainforest tougher than we thought | If the Amazon Rainforest was a country, it would be the 9th biggest in the world. The rainforest has many important functions. It is home to a huge variety of different plants and animals. It also acts like a large carbon sink (a storage place for carbon) by sucking it up from the atmosphere and storing it in plants an... | A bimodal distribution of tropical tree cover at intermediate precipitation levels has been presented as evidence of fire-induced bistability. Here we subdivide satellite vegetation data into those from human-unaffected areas and those from regions close to human-cultivated zones. Bimodality is found to be almost absen... | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15519 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Water-Resources Articles | More river prawns less snail fever | Scientists have long known that in the tropics, dams increase the number of people getting a vicious disease called snail fever. But it is less clear why this happens. We identified the key players in this mystery and put together different geographical, ecological and epidemiological maps to figure it out. It turns ou... | Dams have long been associated with elevated burdens of human schistosomiasis, but how dams increase disease is not always clear, in part because dams have many ecological and socio-economic effects. A recent hypothesis argues that dams block reproduction of the migratory river prawns that eat the snail hosts of schist... | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5413875/ | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Not just ivory another threat for Asian elephants | For centuries, people have hunted and killed both African and Asian elephants for their ivory. Despite many efforts to protect these animals, elephant populations worldwide are still declining. The rapidly increasing human population, on the other hand, has led to elephants habitat shrinking. This further endangers ele... | In the southern Bago Yoma mountain range in Myanmar, Asian elephants are being killed at a disturbing rate. This emerging crisis was identified initially through a telemetry study when 7 of 19 of collared elephants were poached within a year of being fitted with a satellite-GPS collar. Subsequent follow up of ground te... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0194113 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Palm oil is everywhere but where did it come from | What do lipstick, frozen pizza, and laundry detergent have Here, farmers have cleared the forest (an activity called in common? Palm oil. This tropical vegetable oil that most deforestation) quite recently. Similarly, palm plantations in people have never heard of is in half the packaged goods South America are also fr... | Palm oil is the most widely traded vegetable oil globally, with demand projected to increase substantially in the future. Almost all oil palm grows in areas that were once tropical moist forests, some of them quite recently. The conversion to date, and future expansion, threatens biodiversity and increases greenhouse g... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0159668 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Should we let the ocean in or not | Global sea levels are rising there is no doubt about it. But what comes next? Some land near the coast is very likely to be flooded. Should we let it? Or should we try to build dams to keep the water out? We tried to answer this question by studying what happens when you flood uninhabited coastal land. Would it just t... | How will coastal soils in areas newly flooded with seawater function as habitat for benthic marine organisms? This research question is highly relevant as global sea level rise and coastal realignment will cause flooding of soils and form new marine habitats. In this study, we tested experimentally the capacity of comm... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0196097 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Soil bacteria help or hindrance for moving plants | Some plant species tend to spread easily across continents we studied the spread of legumes, a family of plants that and to islands, either because people bring them deliberately includes peas and beans (Fig. ), as well as the mutualistic or because the plants seeds hitchhike, attached to human bacteria that live among... | Microbial symbiosis is integral to plant growth and reproduction, but its contribution to global patterns of plant distribution is unknown. Legumes (Fabaceae) are a diverse and widely distributed plant family largely dependent on symbiosis with nitrogen-fixing rhizobia, which are acquired from soil after germination. T... | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14790 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What are the most dangerous places for sharks | Many people are scared of sharks, but they are actually a very important part of the oceans ecosystem. Did you know that falling coconuts are actually more deadly to humans than sharks? Each year, tens of millions of sharks are caught by fishing vessels (ships). So actually, they should be afraid of us. And instead of ... | Effective ocean management and the conservation of highly migratory species depend on resolving the overlap between animal movements and distributions, and fishing effort. However, this information is lacking at a global scale. Here we show, using a big-data approach that combines satellite-tracked movements of pelagic... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1444-4 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | What can bat migration patterns tell us about Ebola epidemics | What does the migration of bats have to do with Ebola fault on their own, can pass it on to humans. Here we develop a epidemics? More than you (and even a lot of Ebola researchers) mathematical model to predict how the seasonal flight patterns might think. In general, bats are very beneficial for us humans. (migrations... | Understanding Ebola necessarily requires the characterization of the ecology of its main enzootic reservoir, i.e. bats, and its interplay with seasonal and enviroclimatic factors. Here we present a SIR compartmental model where we implement a bidirectional coupling between the available resources and the dynamics of th... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0179559 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What can sea lettuce tell us about coastal pollution | Did anyone ever say you looked green when you were pollution from human activities such as agriculture, farms, sick? This can happen to oceans, too! In fact, people factories or towns enters coastal waters. sometimes observe the coastal waters of Ireland (and in We wanted to find out if one particular seaweed, the many... | Enrichment of nutrients and metals in seawater associated with anthropogenic activities can threaten aquatic ecosystems. Consequently, nutrient and metal concentrations are parameters used to define water quality. The European Unions Water Framework Directive (WFD) goes further than a contaminant-based approach and uti... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169049 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Pollution Articles | What do baby fish make of oil spills | Since people started drilling for oil there have been We studied the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill accidental oil spills at sea that are harmful to marine life. For (DWHOS) and found that the number of Red Snapper larvae instance, birds and other animals get covered in the thick did not change before, duri... | The Deepwater Horizon oil spill (DWHOS) spatially and temporally overlapped with the spawning of many fish species, including Red Snapper, one of the most economically important reef fish in the Gulf of Mexico. To investigate potential impacts of the DWHOS on larval Red Snapper, data from a long-term ichthyoplankton su... | http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/9/094019 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What happens to sea lampreys if catfish move in | Sea lampreys travel through many of the rivers in Europe one that would let us track their movements in the Garonne and North America as they migrate between the places and Dordogne Rivers in France and one that would tell us if where they lay eggs and the ocean. Now they face a new they were eaten by another fish. We ... | Sea lamprey (Petromyzon marinus) is a unique jawless vertebrate among the most primitive of all living vertebrates. This migratory fish is endangered in much of its native area due to dams, overfishing, pollution, and habitat loss. An introduced predator, the European catfish (Silurus glanis), is now widespread in West... | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-62916-w | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | What if a salmon meets a catfish | Do you like to eat salmon? If so, youre not alone. European catfish, a large freshwater fish introduced into Europe for sport fishing, has also developed a taste for it. We wanted to know what happens when salmon and catfish meet in rivers that humans have changed (for instance: by building a power plant). We picked a ... | The Atlantic salmon (Salmo salar) is one of the worlds most emblematic freshwater fish. Despite conservation and rehabilitation plans, populations of this species are dramatically declining due to human impacts such as habitat fragmentation, overfishing and water pollution. Owing to their large body size, anadromous ad... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196046 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | What kinds of landscapes keep bees healthy | Imagine a world without apples, watermelons, and sunflowers It doesnt sound very good, does it? Unfortunately, it could actually happen. Bees help these (and many other) plants grow, but they have been dying. One reason for this is that bees are suffering from more diseases. But where do these bee diseases come from? D... | The pollination services provided by bees are essential for supporting natural and agricultural ecosystems. However, bee population declines have been documented across the world. Many of the factors known to undermine bee health (e.g., poor nutrition) can decrease immunocompetence and, thereby, increase bees susceptib... | https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-78119-2 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | What makes some species successful invaders | Alien invaders are among us. Its true! Every day, foreign plants and animals are turning up in new places. Some of these non-native species do extremely well and out-compete native species. They can cause environmental and economic harm. If they do so, we call them invasive species. Fortunately, not all non-native spec... | Abstract Mutualistic interactions can strongly influence species invasions, as the inability to form successful mutualisms in an exotic range could hamper a host's invasion success. This barrier to invasion may be overcome if an invader either forms novel mutualistic associations or finds and associates with familiar m... | https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.3310 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | What makes tree pests more successful | Have you ever noticed tiny bumps on the branches of a tree? environment. For this reason, we investigated the combined These may have been scale insects. These small insects feed effects of urban warming and drought on trees and their on tree sap. Scale insects on urban trees are notably more insect pests. We measured ... | Urban habitats are characterized by impervious surfaces, which increase temperatures and reduce water availability to plants. The effects of these conditions on herbivorous insects are not well understood, but may provide insight into future conditions. Three primary hypotheses have been proposed to explain why multipl... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0173844 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Social-Science Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Whats harming our oceans | Earth looks like a beautiful blue marble from space. What these benefits, we need to look after ocean habitats. In this makes it so blue? The ocean! Ocean covers % of our study, we used a mathematical model to understand human planet. More than a third of the worlds population lives threats to the Atlantic coast of the... | Coastal habitats provide important benefits to people, including habitat for species targeted by fisheries and opportunities for tourism and recreation. Yet, such human activities also can imperil these habitats and undermine the ecosystem services they provide to people. Cumulative risk assessment provides an analytic... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188776 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles; Paleoscience Articles | Where did flying reptiles come from | Have you heard of flying dinosaurs named pterodactyls [terr- But here the mystery deepens. For a long time it seemed like oh-dak-tlz]? Well, you may be surprised to hear that they there was a huge evolutionary gap between pterosaurs and are not technically dinosaurs. Pterodactyls, part of the group most other animals. ... | Pterosaurs were the first vertebrates to evolve powered flight1and comprised one of the main evolutionary radiations in terrestrial ecosystems of the Mesozoic era (approximately 25266million years ago), but their origin has remained an unresolved enigma in palaeontology since the nineteenth century2,3,4. These flying r... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-3011-4 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Where does Australias wildlife hide | hide away in wild natural parks. But it turns out that many of them might be much closer than we expect right under our noses in the cities where we live. We began this scientific People often think that endangered plants and animals are research to find out exactly how many threatened species live tucked away in a pro... | Although urbanization impacts many species, there is little information on the patterns of occurrences of threatened species in urban relative to non-urban areas. By assessing the extent of the distribution of threatened species across all Australian cities, we aim to investigate the currently under-utilized opportunit... | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/geb.12404 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Where will plants migrate as it gets warmer | We know that the climate is changing. All living things have one of three options: move, adapt or die. Migrating to a more suitable climate is a typical response from animals. But plants, which we think of as stationary organisms, can do that too. Indeed, we expect that many plant communities may shift to new territori... | Changes in climate projected for the 21st century are expected to trigger widespread and pervasive biotic impacts. Forecasting these changes and their implications for ecosystem services is a major research goal. Much of the research on biotic responses to climate change has focused on either projected shifts in indivi... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0130629 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Who knocks down the most trees humans or elephants | If you push a tree really, really hard, do you think you could We wanted to find out who had the greatest effect on make it fall down? You would probably struggle, even if it treefall in African woodlands known as savannas humans, looks quite small and thin. But its easy work for an elephant! or elephants. We collected... | Humans have played a major role in altering savanna structure and function, and growing land-use pressure will only increase their influence on woody cover. Yet humans are often overlooked as ecological components. Both humans and the African elephant Loxodonta africana alter woody vegetation in savannas through remova... | http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecog.02549/abstract | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Who lives in Texas groundwater | Did you know that some salamander species in Texas live To learn more, we collected DNA from salamanders living in in water underground and never see the light of day? the springs and caves of the Edwards-Trinity aquifer system Unfortunately, overuse of groundwater, pollution, and in Texas. Differences in DNA showed th... | Groundwater-dependent species are among the least-known components of global biodiversity, as well as some of the most vulnerable because of rapid groundwater depletion at regional and global scales. The karstic EdwardsTrinity aquifer system of west-central Texas is one of the most species-rich groundwater systems in t... | https://www.pnas.org/content/116/7/2624 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Whos eating all the shrimp | Whether in prawn cocktail, shrimp gumbo, or grilled on the We studied the relationship between the abundance of barbeque, youve probably eaten shrimp lots of times. Its shrimp and the fish that eat them, and found that there the most common seafood in the US. An American eats on was a statistical link between the two. ... | This study investigated the contribution of shrimp stocks in supporting the production of valuable predator species. Fishery-independent data on white shrimp, brown shrimp, and selected fish species (spotted seatrout, red drum, and southern flounder) were collected from 1986 to 2014 by the Texas Parks and Wildlife Depa... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0166479 | Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why are catfish bad neighbors for allis shad | The allis shad is a type of migratory fish. While they typically We wanted to find out if catfish truly are a threat to the already live in the ocean, they travel to rivers during the spring months endangered allis shad. To do this, we monitored a part of the to lay eggs. Sadly, this journey can be deadly for many alli... | Silurus glanisis a large non-native opportunistic predator able to develop hunting strategy in response to newly available prey where it has been introduced. Migrating spawning anadromous prey such as allis shadAlosa alosacould represent this available and energy-rich food resource. Here, we report an impressive catfis... | https://doi.org/10.1007/s10452-020-09811-8 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why are some parasites picky eaters | Nematodes are microscopic roundworms that live in soil, used as biological pest control in the United States. oceans, and lakes (Fig. ). Scientists estimate that there Some parasites are generalists and can infect a wide variety could be a million species of nematodes and that many of hosts while others are specialists... | Entomopathogenic nematodes are a subgroup of insect-parasitic nematodes that are used in biological control as alternatives or supplements to chemical pesticides. Steinernema scapterisci is an unusual member of the entomopathogenic nematode guild for many reasons including that it is promiscuous in its association with... | http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0169410 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles | Why are whales in trouble again | Imagine you are standing on a boat. You look out, searching To find out, we analyzed data from the feeding grounds in all directions for a glimpse of a whale. But you cant find of the North Atlantic Right whale. We found that warmer any. Your excitement fades. Where are the whales? ocean temperatures made food harder t... | Ocean warming linked to anthropogenic climate change is impacting the ecology of marine species around the world. In 2010, the Gulf of Maine and Scotian Shelf regions of the Northwest Atlantic underwent an unprecedented regime shift. Forced by climate-driven changes in the Gulf Stream, warm slope waters entered the reg... | https://tos.org/oceanography/article/ocean-regime-shift-is-driving-collapse-of-the-north-atlantic-right-whale-population | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Why can some monkeys live high in the mountains | Geladas are an unusual primate. They eat mostly grass the DNA of wild geladas. We found a surprising difference in instead of fruit or meat. They are known as bleeding heart how DNA is packaged between geladas from two different monkeys for the bright red patch of skin on their chests. regions of Ethiopia. Also, we kno... | Primates have adapted to numerous environments and lifestyles but very few species are native to high elevations. Here we investigated high-altitude adaptations in the gelada (Theropithecus gelada), a monkey endemic to the Ethiopian Plateau. We examined genome-wide variation in conjunction with measurements of haematol... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-022-01703-4 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Biology Articles | Why do bats need more food to call louder | Have you ever been somewhere noisy and had to shout to animals on earth. Being louder means they can find insects be heard? Imagine having to speak at that volume all day. more easily in the dark, but most bats don\'t "shout" louder Would you feel more tired if you shouted all the time or than a certain level. spoke at... | Vocalizations are of pivotal importance for many animals, yet sound propagation in air is severely limited. To expand their vocalization range, animals can produce high-intensity sounds, which can come at high energetic costs. High-intensity echolocation is thought to have evolved in bats because the costs of calling a... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-020-1249-8 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why do bees use social distancing | Honey bees are important insects in many of the ecosystems We found that in infected colonies there was more social around us. However, they are constantly exposed to many distancing between different types of bees. We also threats. They are particularly vulnerable to disease and discovered that the infection led to hi... | Social distancing in response to infectious diseases is a strategy exhibited by human and nonhuman animals to counteract the spread of pathogens and/or parasites. Honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies are ideal models to study this behavior because of the compartmentalized structure of these societies, evolved under expo... | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj1398 | Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Why do invasive species do so well | Did you know that several different kinds of microbes live in our bodies and that they perform lots of important functions? For example, they can help us fight harmful infections and help us to get all the goodness out of the food we eat. Plants also have special relationships with microbes, particularly those that liv... | Plantmicrobe interactions play crucial roles in species invasions but are rarely investigated at the intraspecific level. Here, we study these interactions in three lineages of a globally distributed plant,Phragmites australis. We use field surveys and a common garden experiment to analyze bacterial communities in the ... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-00626-0 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Water-Resources Articles | Why do invasive species like artificial lakes | It is gross to think about, but did you know that some worms of snails from North America that are new to the lake. The can live in your liver? Liver fluke, a type of flatworm, can infect majority of these snails were infected with a native liver fluke your liver and make you very sick. These parasites grow in parasite... | Parasite spillback, the infection of a non-indigenous organism by a native parasite, is a highly important although understudied component of ecological invasion dynamics. Here, through the first analysis of the parasite fauna of lymnaeid gastropods of Lake Kariba (Zimbabwe). We illustrate how the creation of an artifi... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2018.12.307 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles; Energy-And-Climate Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Why is the worlds most expensive fungus disappearing | Meet the worlds most wanted parasite: a mummified caterpillar with a fungus growing right out of its face. Even stranger: it costs three times its weight in gold! This super-expensive fungus grows in the alpine regions of the Himalayas and Tibetan Plateau where it is cold and dry. Its promised health benefits include i... | Demand for traditional medicine ingredients is causing species declines globally. Due to this trade, Himalayan caterpillar fungus (Ophiocordyceps sinensis) has become one of the worlds most valuable biological commodities, providing a crucial source of income for hundreds of thousands of collectors. However, the result... | https://www.pnas.org/content/115/45/11489 | Lower high school |
Biodiversity-And-Conservation Articles | Would beavers make good firefighters | We all know beavers as cute animals with flat tails. They And this actually helps the plants around beaver dams to gnaw down trees with their sharp teeth and build dams in survive during wildfires! Therefore, we can think of beavers rivers. But beavers are much more than lumberjacks. By not only as great lumberjacks, b... | Beaver dams are gaining popularity as a low-tech, low-cost strategy to build climate resiliency at the landscape scale. They slow and store water that can be accessed by riparian vegetation during dry periods, effectively protecting riparian ecosystems from droughts. Whether or not this protection extends to wildfire h... | https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2225 | Elementary school; Middle school |
Biology Articles | Bullfrogs a Trojan horse for a deadly fungus | Did you know that amphibians have very special skin? They have helped spread Bd. Bullfrogs dont show signs of sickness use their skin to breathe and drink water. But a skin-eating when they are infected, which makes them Bd vectors. This fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), is killing them. is alarming because ... | Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd), a causal agent of the amphibian fungal skin disease chytridiomycosis, has been implicated in the decline and extinction of over 200 species worldwide since the 1970s. Despite almost two decades of research, the history of Bd and its global spread is not well understood. However, the... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0188384 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | Can a spray make our crops better | Did you know the first genetically modified crop was what if we can change the crops without changing a tomato with delayed ripening? Genetically modified their DNA? organisms (GMOs) have been around for decades We tried using special molecules. They can change now. And they offer a lot of benefits. For example, cell a... | Genetic engineering of economically important traits in plants is an effective way to improve global welfare. However, introducing foreign DNA molecules into plant genomes to create genetically engineered plants not only requires a lengthy testing period and high developmental costs but also is not well-accepted by the... | https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsnano.1c07723 | Elementary school; Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles | Can armadillos show us how to regrow a liver | What if we could make our bodys old or sick cells act young again? Surprisingly, the bacteria that cause leprosy may show us how. Previously, we discovered that infecting cells with leprosy bacteria in a laboratory dish reprogrammed the cells back to an immature state. The cells may then be able to produce many differe... | Ideal therapies for regenerative medicine or healthy aging require healthy organ growth and rejuvenation, but no organ-level approach is currently available. Using Mycobacterium leprae (ML) with natural partial cellular reprogramming capacity and its animal host nine-banded armadillos, we present an evolutionarily refi... | https://www.cell.com/cell-reports-medicine/fulltext/S2666-3791(22)00379-2 | Lower high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | Can graphene in your clothing stop mosquito bites | Wouldnt it be great if there was clothing out there graphene indeed kept mosquitoes from biting people. that could fully protect us from mosquito bites? This We were surprised to realize that it not only acted as could reduce itching and the spread of mosquito- a physical barrier for the insects mouthparts, but also bo... | Graphene-based materials are being developed for a variety of wearable technologies to provide advanced functions that include sensing; temperature regulation; chemical, mechanical, or radiative protection; or energy storage. We hypothesized that graphene films may also offer an additional unanticipated function: mosqu... | https://www.pnas.org/content/116/37/18304 | Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | Can viruses save lives | Have you ever heard of bacteriophages? They are tiny protect us against bacterial diseases? Researchers have used viruses that can infect and kill bacteria, including the phage to treat disease in the past. But were they successful? harmful bacteria that make us sick! Scientists discovered We reviewed clinical reports ... | Purpose Widespread antibiotic-resistant bacteria are threatening the arsenal of existing antibiotics. Not only are antibiotics less likely to be effective today, but their extensive use continues to drive the emergence of multidrug-resistant pathogens. A new-old antibacterial strategy with bacteriophages (phages) is un... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.clinthera.2020.07.014 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | Can we write biological software updates to cure disease | Did you know that each of the trillions of cells in your body makes decisions at every moment of the day? While cells do not have brains, they do have molecular sensors that tell them what to do if a certain molecule or signal is present around them. This makes them similar to a computer program: input in, response o... | Synthetic protein-level circuits could enable engineering of powerful new cellular behaviors. Rational protein circuit design would be facilitated by a composable protein-protein regulation system in which individual protein components can regulate one another to create a variety of different circuit architectures. In ... | http://science.sciencemag.org/content/361/6408/1252 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How are aging and gut bacteria related | We know that bacteria can be harmful and can cause a lot of diseases. But did you know that not all bacteria are bad? In fact, there are trillions of bacteria inside us that help us to live! These bacteria make up the gut microbiome. We wanted to understand the relationship between our gut bacteria and how we age. We f... | Gut microbial diversity decreases with aging, but existing studies have used stool samples, which do not represent the entire gut. We analyzed the duodenal microbiome in 251 subjects aged 18-35 (n = 32), 36-50 (n = 41), 51-65 (n = 96), and 66-80 (n = 82). Decreased duodenal microbial diversity in older subjects is asso... | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34592155/ | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Chemistry Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How are chemicals impacting our reproductive health | You might have heard of a chemical called BPA. Maybe you have seen a BPA Free label on a reusable water bottle. But did you know that BPA is just one chemical that is part of a much larger group known as endocrine-disrupting chemicals, or EDCs? EDCs are everywhere. They are in most food packaging, cosmetics, shampoo, a... | Over the past century, evidence has emerged that endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs) have an impact on reproductive health. An increased frequency of reproductive disorders has been observed worldwide in both wildlife and humans that is correlated with accidental exposures to EDCs and their increased production. Epid... | https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935121013359?via%3Dihub | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can bacteria stop dengue | Vector-borne diseases are a major threat to human health. Diseases caused by viruses and parasites carried by mosquitoes kill millions of people every year. How can we control these diseases? One of the methods scientists have tried to develop recently is biocontrol the use of natural enemies to control mosquito popul... | Background: A number of new technologies are under development for the control of mosquito transmitted viruses, such as dengue, chikungunya and Zika that all require the release of modified mosquitoes into the environment. None of these technologies has been able to demonstrate evidence that they can be implemented at ... | https://gatesopenresearch.org/articles/2-36/v2 | Lower high school; Middle school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles; Technology Articles | How can gene editing cure disease | Did you know that the cell copies nucleotides (letters of In most cases, even this is okay. The baby is a carrier of DNA code) per second when it is dividing? And it only makes a bad copy of the gene, but often the good copy from the one mistake per million nucleotides! Thats like copying other parent will work well en... | Genetic diseases can be diagnosed early during pregnancy, but many monogenic disorders continue to cause considerable neonatal and pediatric morbidity and mortality. Early intervention through intrauterine gene editing, however, could correct the genetic defect, potentially allowing for normal organ development, functi... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04894-2.pdf | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can GM tomatoes help fight cancer | Did your parents ever tell you that eating your fruit and veggies is good for you? Well, theyre right! Fruits and vegetables contain powerful agents called antioxidants that can help us fight many diseases, including one of the biggest killers of all: cancer. With genetic engineering techniques, we created a new tomato... | In recent years, by extensive achievements in understanding the mechanisms and the pathways affected by cancer, the focus of cancer research is shifting from developing new chemotherapy methods to using natural compounds with therapeutic properties to reduce the adverse effects of synthetic drugs on human health. We us... | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0175778 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Pollution Articles; Water-Resources Articles | How can we find oil-eating bacteria to clean up the sea | Crude oil is widely used in our everyday life to produce for cleaning up. The problem is that those other methods plastics, streets, fuel and other items. Unfortunately, oil is also harm the environment just not as much as oil does. toxic to plants and animals (including humans). If it gets We wanted companies to be mo... | Over the past 100 years, oil spills and long-term waste deposition from oil refineries have significantly polluted the environment. These contaminants have widespread negative effects on human health and ecosystem functioning. Natural attenuation of long chain and polyaromatic hydrocarbons is slow and often incomplete.... | https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.01318/full | Middle school |
Biology Articles; Paleoscience Articles | How can we find out about ancient Egyptian germs | Microbes are everywhere on Earth. Theyre in the soil, the rocks, the oceans, and in your body! The organisms living on you are called your microbiome. Your microbiome is important for your health. We wanted to know if we could use DNA to learn about the microbiome of mummified ancient Egyptian people. We used a new tec... | Recent advances in sequencing have facilitated large-scale analyses of the metagenomic composition of different samples, including the environmental microbiome of air, water, and soil, as well as the microbiome of living humans and other animals. Analyses of the microbiome of ancient human samples may provide insights ... | https://doi.org/10.1186/s12915-020-00839-8 | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we grow models of embryos in the lab | Studying embryos is important to understanding how stem cells can form structures that look like blastocysts. We humans develop. It can also help us understand some called these models blastoids. pregnancy complications. But access to embryos is very Blastoids grow and develop at a similar speed as blastocysts. limited... | Limited access to embryos has hampered the study of human embryogenesis and disorders that occur during early pregnancy. Human pluripotent stem cells provide an alternative means to study human development in a dish1,2,3,4,5,6,7. Recent advances in partial embryo models derived from human pluripotent stem cells have en... | https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03356-y | Lower high school; Middle school |
Biology Articles; Chemistry Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we make antimalarial medicine faster | For most people, getting a mosquito bite is annoying. For others, it could be life-threatening. Mosquitoes are carriers of many diseases, including malaria. According to the World Health Organization, in 2019 there were 229 million cases of malaria worldwide and about 409,000 people died from this disease. This is why ... | Artemisinin is the plant natural product used to treat malaria. The endoperoxide bridge of artemisinin confers its antiparasitic properties. Dihydroartemisinic acid is the biosynthetic precursor of artemisinin that was previously shown to nonenzymatically undergo endoperoxide formation to yield artemisinin. This report... | https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jnatprod.1c00246 | Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Health-And-Medicine Articles | How can we outsmart Zika virus | The mosquito-transmitted Zika virus has been in the news a lot lately. Do you know what scientists are doing to protect us from it? When the virus infects pregnant women, it can cause neurological defects in their unborn children. Microcephaly (abnormally small heads) is the worst defect caused by Zika.Currently, there... | Therapies to prevent maternal Zika virus (ZIKV) infection and its subsequent fetal developmental complications are urgently required. We isolated three potent ZIKV-neutralizing monoclonal antibodies (nmAbs) from the plasmablasts of a ZIKV-infected patientSMZAb1, SMZAb2, and SMZAb5directed against two different domains ... | http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/9/410/eaan8184 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
Biology Articles; Food-And-Agriculture Articles | How can we protect bananas | A fungal disease, called Black Sigatoka, is threatening banana crops worldwide. The reason for this is the lack of genetic diversity in commercial bananas the Cavendish as all of these bananas are clones. So any disease that can kill one of them can kill them all. And this is the case with Black Sigatoka. Farmers can... | Black Sigatoka or black leaf streak disease, caused by the Dothideomycete fungus Pseudocercospora fijiensis (previously: Mycosphaerella fijiensis), is the most significant foliar disease of banana worldwide. Due to the lack of effective host resistance, management of this disease requires frequent fungicide application... | http://journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/article?id=10.1371/journal.pgen.1005876 | Lower high school; Upper high school |
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