The stability of ecosystems is affected by biodiversity at every level of the food chain. Scientists recently discovered that herbivore asynchrony stabilized a semi-arid grassland ecosystem by serving as a biological buffer between plant and predator communities.

A sunfish being blown to bits is the result of a never before described behavior of an orca pod in the Gulf of California. Researchers observed two separate events in which one orca held a sunfish carcass by the fin and another torpedoed toward it, blowing it into smithereens. The behavior could be a way to portion off more manageable pieces of food for calves present during the interaction, but it’s also possible that it serves an entirely different function: fun. The team said more observations of such events involving sunfish are needed to determine the exact ecological and evolutionary significance of the strategies in orca populations.

We can now measure changes in the thousands of different and invisible microbes that contribute to healthy reef communities.

In 2012, Nature revealed that humans provide a home to thousands of different species of microbes, in a series of papers that opened a path to understanding the impact of the human microbiome on our health.

Today, a paper in Nature documents over 800,000 microbial genomes, identifying over 500 new bacterial species and over 300,000 distinct viruses in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef.

This invisible community was documented using DNA found in samples of seawater from 48 reefs, by a research team led by The University of Queensland and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS).

The authors believe this is the first time that the microbiome of the open waters of reef systems on the Great Barrier Reef has been comprehensively surveyed. They have created the Great Barrier Reef Microbial Genomes Database which is available to all reef researchers.

“Now, we can start to explore what makes a healthy reef microbiome, and how these invisible communities respond to changes on the Great Barrier Reef such as bleaching, storms, sediment, fishing and other stresses,” Professor Philip Hugenholtz, a microbiologist at the University of Queensland and a senior author on the paper said.

Researchers from James Cook University, University of Melbourne and University of Tasmania also contributed to the study.

A team of Vermont scientists were stunned to discover melanoma that moves from catfish to catfish like a parasite in US and Canadian lakes. It's the first-ever transmissible cancer found in a freshwater animal and only the fourth ever seen in nature.

As nations worldwide confront the urgent challenge of climate change, China's "Dual Carbon" goals prioritize significant decarbonization across all economic sectors. While industrial and energy sectors often receive primary attention, the agricultural sector, particularly livestock farming, represents a substantial source of potent greenhouse gases like methane (CH₄) and nitrous oxide (N₂O). Local governments in China have implemented stringent environmental regulations, such as "Livestock-Free Zones," to curb agricultural pollution. However, the overall effectiveness of these spatially targeted policies, especially regarding their potential to displace environmental burdens, remains a subject of considerable debate.

A recent study investigated the impacts of the "Livestock-Free Zone" policy in Guangdong Province, China's largest provincial economy. Researchers utilized county-level panel data from 2014 to 2023, employing a sophisticated combination of spatial Durbin models, continuous difference-in-differences models, and network analysis. This approach allowed for a precise quantification of the policy's local effects and any subsequent spatial spillover, addressing gaps in understanding policy-induced pollution transfers within land-intensive agricultural sectors and at subnational scales.