A newly established alliance, comprising leading researchers and conservation experts, has mobilised to safeguard the Atlantic Ocean's leatherback turtle populations.

How do you preserve one of the world’s rarest animals when so few remain? Researchers created an unprecedented 3D digital archive of the vaquita — the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Using advanced CT and micro-CT imaging, the team captured the skeleton of a female porpoise from 1966, in extraordinary detail, from its overall anatomy to microscopic bone structures. Freely available online, the models provide a lasting resource for research, education and conservation, ensuring this critically endangered species on the verge of extinction can be studied for generations to come.

A new study demonstrates that honeybees can evaluate the reliability of their own communication, actively adjusting the vigor of their "waggle dance" based on the truthfulness of the information they provide. By manipulating whether a dancing bee's followers successfully found food, experiments revealed that only bees with verified, "honest" information increased their recruitment effort over time when advertising a new location, whereas "liar" or "unverified" bees did not. This internal self-control mechanism naturally filters out ambiguous or misleading signals, allowing the hive to function efficiently as a cooperative superorganism.

A Virginia Tech-led team of international scientists has solved one of the last major mysteries in millipede evolution, revealing new clues about a group of animals that helped pave the way for life on land. The findings, published in Current Biology, complete the first evolutionary history of all living millipede orders. By combining genomic data from living species with morphological evidence from fossils, researchers traced the group's origins to nearly 460 million years ago — suggesting millipedes may have been present long before the oldest known millipede fossils.