University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Jeff Podos and his former UMass Amherst graduate student João C.T. Menezes have just found two contenders for the world’s loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema, on their way to partially solving the mystery of why some birds are so much louder than others.

Wildlife researchers have found that both recreation and roads affect wolverine populations in Canada's Rocky Mountains and Columbia Mountains. It’s believed to be the first time that a study has shown, at a landscape scale, that recreation is linked to lower population density in a carnivore.

Kyoto, Japan -- Like many parasites, nematomorphs are known to manipulate the behavior of their hosts to complete their life cycles. Also known as horsehair worms, among other names, these creatures develop in their hosts' body cavities and lure their terrestrial arthropod victims into the water where the parasites then reproduce. Some species have even been observed to induce positive phototaxis, attracting the host toward horizontally polarized light reflected on the water's surface.

Given that some parasites, including nematomorphs, target nocturnal hosts, a team of researchers at Kyoto University wondered if parasites manipulate their nocturnal hosts in sync with the lunar cycle. If such a manipulation mechanism has been conserved across nematomorph lineages, the team hypothesized that water-entry behavior in nocturnal hosts infected by Gordius and Gordionus nematomorphs may be more prevalent during the full moon, and sparse during the new moon.

From August to October during nights of the full and new moon, the researchers sampled camel crickets floating on the water in a small artificial pond in the Kiso River system in Nagano prefecture, where they also found large numbers of nematomorphs. In addition, they examined the stomach contents of salmonid fish in a nearby forested stream, treating the fish as fellow field researchers that continuously survey the river, day and night.

Liver tissue from 1,003 Barred Owls removed across northwestern California between 2019 and 2025 shows that anticoagulant rodenticides remain pervasive in forest food webs, with more than one in three owls exposed. Exposure among young owls declined following California's statewide restrictions, suggesting the regulations are working. At the same time, cholecalciferol, a less regulated rodenticide that also occurs naturally as vitamin D3, was detected in nearly one in five owls and appears to be increasing. Whether these detections reflect rodenticide baits or natural sources cannot yet be fully resolved, but the pattern is consistent with product substitution and warrants further study.