A French team coordinated by a scientist at CNRS highlights the harmful impact on sparrow reproduction of chronic exposure to tebuconazole, one of the most widely used fungicides in agriculture in Europe. These findings, recently published in Environmental Research, reveal a direct link between exposure to this fungicide and slower growth, as well as increased mortality, in sparrow chicks, with a greater impact on females.

 At just 1–2mm long, newborn warty birch caterpillars (Falcaria bilineata) are minute, but even though they are tiny they defend the world’s smallest territory: the tip of a birch leaf. They scrape and thump their leaf tip homes to produce vibrations that warn of intruders, but confrontations over their tiny territories never come to blows, protecting both protagonists from injury.