Nature

Fireflies are lighting up summer evenings across the U.S. Northeast, putting on dazzling shows in backyards and city parks.This post was originally published on this site

In a study published today in Scientific Reports, UNSW Sydney researchers found that the underwater songs of leopard seals (Hydrurga leptonyx) in Antarctica share structural similarities with the nursery rhymes often sung by humans to […]

Microclimates—as opposed to large-scale regional or even global scale macroclimate models—may hold the key to offsetting the negative impacts of extreme weather events on already vulnerable insect populations.This post was originally published on this site

Even a toddler knows that plants need water. It’s perhaps the first thing we learn about these green life-forms. But how plants budget this resource varies considerably. The kapok trees of the Amazon have adopted […]

For decades, scientists and conservationists have been using aboveground plant biodiversity as a metric for conserving ecosystems. Now, a new study finds that there is a major mismatch between aboveground plant diversity and Earth’s underground […]

An international study led by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), Spain, has investigated how marine ecosystems responded to past episodes of ocean deoxygenation. To do so, […]

Viruses in the cold waters of the Arctic are strongly seasonal and are also detected in the Antarctic. This surprising discovery comes from a multi-year time-series study led by the GEOMAR Helmholtz Center for Ocean […]

How much carbon can the ocean absorb, and what happens to it as the planet warms? Sonya Dyhrman, a microbial oceanographer and professor at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is trying to answer these questions. (Lamont is […]

Whales of all shapes and sizes play a significant role in the health of marine ecosystems. About 50% of the air humans breathe is produced by the ocean, thanks to phytoplankton and whale waste. The […]

Oceanic islands are biologically unique and irreplaceable because they have never been connected to continental mainlands and often host endemic species. Human activities have considerably altered these ecosystems. Predator introduction and landscape transformation have severely […]