Ports are typically highly polluted environments, which makes it imperative to find new ways to clean them up. Here, scientists studied five species of common Mediterranean sea sponges to see whether they can function as ‘ecosystem engineers’ for filtering water and nature restoration. One tested species, commonly called the ‘chicken kidney sponge’ proved especially hardy when transplanted to a busy polluted recreational port near Girona, Spain. Under these challenging conditions, it typically thrived to the point where it could reproduce asexually into dispersing clones. The authors intend to use this species in further long-term renaturalization trials.

Ex-captive elephants released into the wild adapt quite well to the return to wild environments, according to a study published July 29, 2026 in the open access journal PLOS One by Tenisha Roos and Tamara Eggeling of the Elephant Reintegration Trust of South Africa and colleagues.

In a study of Swiss adults, women and people who spent more time with a pet or another animal they might feel close to reported feeling more attached to the animal and receiving more socio-emotional support from it. However, the study found little evidence for links between pet ownership and participants’ overall wellbeing. Rahel Marti of the University of Basel, Switzerland, and colleagues present these findings in the open access journal PLOS One on July 29, 2026.

Scientists from China, Europe, and the USA, including Dr. Stephan Spiekman, a paleontologist at the State Museum of Natural History Stuttgart and the University of Hohenheim, have described a remarkable fossil of the long-necked marine reptile Austronaga minuta from China. Although this reptile descended from land-dwelling reptiles, it was already superbly adapted to life in the water around 245 million years ago. This almost completely preserved fossil provides the first detailed view of this prehistoric animal's entire skeleton and large parts of its digestive system. Various internal organs, such as the stomach, liver and intestines, have been clearly identified using modern analytical methods. This is the oldest known example of a largely complete digestive system in a reptile to date. The research results on this extraordinary find have now been published in the journal “Science Advances”.