A single climate-change-fueled cyclone killed 7% of Tapanuli orangutans ‪—‬ the world's rarest great apes ‪—‬ in just four days last year, new research reveals.

The study shows that "climate change-driven weather poses an immediate, catastrophic threat to the world's rarest great ape," the researchers wrote.

Tapanuli orangutans (Pongo tapanuliensis) live in the Batang Toru forest in northern Sumatra, Indonesia. Pushed to the brink of extinction by habitat destruction, the entire species consisted of 767 individuals in 2019, of which 581 lived in the forest's west block.

Then, Cyclone Senyar arrived.

Across four days in November 2025, the rare and damaging tropical cyclone caused extreme rainfall and catastrophic landslides across this west block forest region, killing approximately 58 Tapanuli orangutans. These individuals died from drowning, suffocation under landslides, or impacts from collapsing trees, according to the study, which was published June 10 in the journal Current Biology.

The loss equates to 11% of the west block orangutans and roughly 7% of the whole species.

"It is extremely worrying for the future of this ape," study co-author Serge Wich, a professor of primate biology at Liverpool John Moores University in the U.K., told The Guardian.

World's rarest great apes

Tapanuli orangutans were classified as a new species, distinct from their Bornean (P. pygmaeus) and Sumatran (P. abelii) orangutan cousins, in 2017, making them the most recently identified, and rarest, species of great ape.

Orangutans are especially vulnerable to environmental shocks because of their slow rate of reproduction; they have roughly six- to nine-year gaps between each baby. They are also heavily dependent on tree cover to survive.

In the new analysis, researchers combined pre- and post-cyclone satellite imagery with orangutan population density estimates to evaluate the impact of the flooding and landslides on the apes.

Before the cyclone, 99.3% of the Batang Toru forest west block was forested. Then, after the storm's arrival, 21.8 inches (556 millimeters) of rain fell over four days, leading to landslides across 20,517 acres (8,303 hectares) of Tapanuli orangutan habitat. The researchers identified over 50,000 "scars" from this landslide-induced habitat destruction in the forest landscape.

This habitat loss was catastrophic for the orangutans. "Given the high density (>50,000) of sudden, steppe-slope landslides causing canopy collapse and debris flow into drainage networks, and the limited opportunity for arboreal [via trees] escape during rapid slope failure, we consider mortalities by burial, trauma, or subsequent drowning to be likely," the authors wrote in the study.

The long-term effects of topsoil destruction on the food supply will also harm the remaining orangutans, the authors wrote. With topsoil containing dense networks of plant-feeding fungi, it will take time for the fruit and leaves the orangutans rely on to return.

World Weather Attribution, a research group that studies extreme weather events, found that Cyclone Senyar was intensified by a combination of human-induced climate change, an ocean oscillation called the negative Indian Ocean Dipole, and La Niña, the cooler phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate cycle.

Climate change is projected to increase the frequency and intensity of heavy rainfall worldwide, including in Indonesia. And now that El Niño is officially here, the climate event will likely make the Pacific hurricane season stronger. This El Niño period is forecast to "rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record going back to 1950," NOAA officials wrote in a June 11 update.

"El Niño conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in a June 2 video statement. "The world must treat it as the urgent climate warning it is."

British broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has frolicked with gorillas, tracked ancient fish, introduced viewers to flying pterosaurs, and warned millions that the natural world is running out of time. For more than 70 years, his calm and unmistakable voice has guided audiences through some of Earth's most spectacular ecosystems, including the deep ocean, tropical rainforests and frozen poles.

On May 8, 2026, Attenborough turns 100. The milestone highlights an extraordinary life in communicating the science of planet Earth ‪—‬ a career that began at the BBC in the early 1950s, helped define modern wildlife filmmaking, and eventually made Attenborough one of the world's most recognizable advocates for conservation and climate action.

But there are lesser-known stories, too: the BBC job rejection that nearly sent him down another path, the Jewish refugee children his family adopted during World War II, the fan letters he still tries to answer, and the rats he cannot stand.

To mark Attenborough's 100th birthday, here are 13 surprising facts about the broadcaster who changed how we see life on Earth.

1. He's still making nature films as he turns 100.

Attenborough is still closely involved in natural history broadcasting. His 2025 feature-length documentary, "Ocean with David Attenborough," was timed around major international ocean events, including World Oceans Day (June 8) and the 2025 United Nations Ocean Conference, and focuses on marine ecosystems and the solutions that will safeguard them for future generations.

2. He helped shape British TV before becoming the face of wildlife documentaries.

Long before the popular "Planet Earth" and "The Blue Planet," Attenborough was a powerful figure behind the camera. In 1965, he was appointed controller (a type of editorial position) of BBC Two, then a young TV channel still defining its identity. Under his leadership, BBC Two became known for its ambitious cultural and educational programming, including series such as "Monty Python's Flying Circus," "Civilisation" and "The Ascent of Man." Attenborough stepped down from this role in 1972 to develop his own series, "Life on Earth."

3. He's the reason tennis balls are brightly colored.

During his time as BBC Two controller, Attenborough was in charge of introducing color on television, beating Germany to the first-ever color broadcasts in Europe. Shortly after the first Wimbledon color broadcast in 1967, Attenborough pushed for the tournament to change its balls from traditional white to bright yellow for easier visibility — a change that eventually stuck.

4. His brother played John Hammond in "Jurassic Park."

David Attenborough is not the only famous Attenborough. His older brother was Richard Attenborough, the Oscar-winning actor and director who is most famous for playing John Hammond, the eccentric billionaire behind the dinosaur theme park in Steven Spielberg's 1993 blockbuster "Jurassic Park." Richard Attenborough, who was also known for directing the award-winning 1982 film "Gandhi," was the oldest of the three Attenborough brothers; David was the middle child, and their younger brother, John, became a motor-industry executive. David is the only surviving sibling.

5. More than 50 organisms have been named after him.

Attenborough's name lives on not just in television but also in science. The exact number is difficult to calculate, but more than 50 organisms have been named in his honor, ranging from living frogs, plants, fish and insects to extinct marine reptiles. They include Nepenthes attenboroughii (a carnivorous pitcher plant), Pristimantis attenboroughi (rubber frog), Attenborosaurus (a genus of plesiosaurs, extinct prehistoric marine reptiles), Microleo attenboroughi (an extinct prehistoric marsupial lion) and many more.

6. He doesn't like rats.

Attenborough has remained unperturbed by encounters with mountain gorillas, venomous snakes and countless other dangerous wild animals, but rats are another matter. He has spoken openly about his dislike of them, tracing the aversion to one night in the Solomon Islands, when, during a thunderstorm, he discovered rats running across his bed and the floor of his hut. Even so, he has stressed that rats, like all animals, deserve respect.

7. He was rejected from the first BBC job he applied for.

Attenborough's first attempt to join the BBC did not go well. In 1950, when he was 24 years old, he applied to become a radio talk show producer and was rejected. He later joined the broadcaster as a trainee producer in 1952, which marked the beginning of a BBC career that would define nature broadcasting for generations.

8. He never passed his driving test and still doesn't drive.

Despite a lifetime of filming in remote rainforests, deserts, islands and polar regions, Attenborough never passed his driving test. He has said he doesn't like driving ‪—‬ a surprising detail for someone whose career is so closely related to travel.

9. His parents took in two Jewish refugees during World War II.

During World War II, Attenborough's parents fostered Irene and Helga Bejach, two Jewish sisters who had fled Nazi Germany shortly before the war began in 1939. The girls lived with the Attenborough family in Leicester for seven years before moving to New York to join a relative. Decades later, Attenborough hosted a reunion for the sisters' descendants.

10. He tries to write back to fans.

Attenborough receives huge amounts of fan mail, but he tries to reply when he can. In a 2021 BBC Radio 1 interview, he said he receives as many as 70 letters a day and asked correspondents to include a self-addressed, stamped envelope if they wanted a response.

11. He served in the Royal Navy.

Before becoming a broadcaster, Attenborough completed national service in the Royal Navy. He was called up in 1947 and was posted to an aircraft carrier. After leaving the Navy, he worked in publishing, editing children's science textbooks. Though it was an early hint of the educational mission that would later define his TV career, he soon tired of the work.

12. His first BBC program was about a "living fossil."

Attenborough's first BBC program as a trainee producer was "Coelacanth," a broadcast in 1952. The program focused on the rediscovery of the coelacanth, a deep-sea fish once thought to be closely linked to the ancestors of land vertebrates. Scientists now know lungfish are the closest living relatives of tetrapods, the four-limbed vertebrates that include amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals.

The "Coelacanth" program told the story of a remarkable fish that scientists had known only from fossils and believed had vanished with the nonavian dinosaurs around 66 million years ago. That changed in 1938, when a trawler working in South Africa hauled up a strange, steel-blue fish with fleshy, limb-like fins. The rediscovery stunned scientists and made the coelacanth one of the most famous "living fossils" on Earth.

13. Baby mountain gorillas attempted to steal his shoes.

One of Attenborough's most famous animal encounters happened in Rwanda while he was filming "Life on Earth" in 1979. As he sat among mountain gorillas, two young gorillas began tugging at his shoes. Attenborough later described the moment as "bliss." The scene remains one of the defining images of his career, unscripted and full of wonder.

How much do you know about our blue planet? Test your terran knowledge with our Earth quiz!

Two marsupial species that were thought to have gone extinct at least 6,000 years ago have been found on the island of New Guinea.

The discovery was far from swift, with the first clues of the marsupials emerging in 1999 and requiring ample photographic evidence to confirm. But 27 years later, scientists are now sure that the ring-tailed glider (Tous ayamaruensis) and the pygmy long-fingered possum (Dactylonax kambuayai) are alive in the remote rainforests of the Vogelkop Peninsula in Papuan Indonesia.

"The Vogelkop is an ancient piece of the Australian continent that has become incorporated into the island of New Guinea," Tim Flannery, a professor at the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute and a distinguished visiting fellow at the Australian Museum who led the research, said in a statement. "Its forests may shelter yet more hidden relics of a past Australia."

Marsupials are mammals with a characteristic pouch to hold newborns until they are fully developed. The pygmy long-fingered possum and the ring-tailed glider were previously known to scientists only from fossils in Australia dating to the last ice age and the first phase of the early Holocene epoch, which is the current period of geological time.

The pygmy long-fingered possum is a striped marsupial with one digit on each hand that is twice as long as the next-longest finger. The ring-tailed glider is a relative of Australia's three greater glider (Petauroides) species, which are named after their ability to soar through forest canopies using furry membranes that extend from their elbows to their ankles. The ring-tailed glider is smaller than its Australian cousins and has unfurred ears, as well as a tail adapted for grasping and wrapping around objects such as branches.

The pygmy long-fingered possum and the ring-tailed glider are what researchers call "Lazarus taxa," meaning they are animals that vanish from the fossil record and seem to go extinct for an extended period before reemerging as living species. Their recent discovery was possible thanks to Indigenous communities in Papuan Indonesia that helped Flannery and his colleagues track down the animals. Specifically, the researchers collaborated with local elders from the Tambrauw and Maybrat clans.

"The discovery of one Lazarus taxon, even if thought to have become extinct recently, is an exceptional discovery," Flannery said. "But the discovery of two species, thought to have been extinct for thousands of years, is remarkable."

Some local Indigenous groups consider the ring-tailed glider to be sacred and deserving of the highest protection, which might help explain why the species has remained hidden, New Scientist reported.

Ring-tailed gliders form lifelong pair bonds and raise only one young per year. Like greater gliders, they nest in tree hollows, which makes them extremely vulnerable to logging.

The pygmy long-fingered possum also faces threats from logging. Its ears may be adapted to detect low-frequency sounds, including noise from wood-boring beetle larvae, which the possums dig out from rotting wood with their fingers to eat, Flannery told New Scientist.

Much remains unknown about the specific range and ecological needs of each species. The exact locations where they were found is being kept secret to prevent wildlife traders from targeting them. What is known so far about the marsupials was published March 6 in two peer-reviewed studies in the journal Records of the Australian Museum.

"The findings underscore the critical importance of preserving these unique bioregions and the value of collaborative research in uncovering and protecting hidden biodiversity," Flannery said in the statement.

Scientists have identified three new toad species that give birth to live "toadlets" rather than laying eggs.

All three species are part of the Nectophrynoides genus, also known as "tree toads," which is a group known for birthing live baby toads that skip the tadpole stage. Previously thought to be one species with a large population and habitat range, these smaller, more fragmented species may require additional conservation measures, researchers wrote in a new study.

"Live-bearing is exceptionally rare among frogs and toads, practiced by less than 1% of frogs species, making these new species exceptionally interesting," study co-author H. Christoph Liedtke, a researcher who studies amphibian evolution at the Spanish National Research Council, said in a statement.

Just 17 of over 7,000 known species of frogs and toads were known to give birth to live young prior to this study, with 13 of them being part of the Nectophrynoides genus. The new study, published Nov. 6 in the journal Vertebrate Zoology, adds the three newly identified species to each of those totals.

Researchers first identified a species called Nectophrynoides viviparus in 1905 and classified it within the Nectophrynoides genus in 1926. Since then, scientists have found specimens of N. viviparus across the Eastern Arc Mountains and Southern Highlands of Tanzania. But a 2016 study suggested that many of those toads were genetically distinct enough that they might be from multiple similar-but-distinct species.

In the new study, researchers looked more closely at Nectophrynoides toads from the Eastern Arc Mountains. They studied hundreds of toad specimens preserved in museums, as well as recordings of some of the toads' calls in the wild. Using methods collectively known as museomics, they also sampled mitochondrial DNA from some of the museum specimens.

Together, the research revealed that the toads in that region were in fact from four separate species, three of which had not been identified before. These species — Nectophrynoides saliensis, Nectophrynoides luhomeroensis and Nectophrynoides uhehe — look similar to N. viviparus. However, slight differences in their genetics, their head shapes, and the shape and positioning of the glands on their shoulders distinguish them. Other toads from farther north in the mountains might constitute even more new species, the scientists noted.

"Some of these specimens were collected over 120 years ago," study co-author Alice Petzold, an evolutionary scientist at the University of Potsdam in Germany, said in the statement. "Our museomics work was able to reveal exactly which populations those old specimens belonged to, giving us a lot more confidence for future work on these toads."

Researchers previously thought N. viviparus was widespread across the Eastern Arc Mountains and Southern Highlands and that it wasn't vulnerable or endangered. But the discovery that the four distinct species have much smaller and more fragmented habitats could change their conservation statuses, since each individual species might be more at risk than expected. One related species, Nectophrynoides asperginis, went extinct in the wild in 2009 following the construction of a nearby dam and a fungal disease outbreak.

"The forests where these toads are known to occur are disappearing quickly," study co-author John Lyakurwa, a biologist at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania, said in the statement. These habitats are vulnerable to both human uses and climate change.

Future studies could help scientists determine how threatened each species is and inform possible conservation strategies, the researchers wrote in the study.

Jane Goodall, the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees, has died at the age of 91, the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) confirmed in a statement on Wednesday (Oct. 1). Goodall died of natural causes in Los Angeles, California, while on a speaking tour.

Goodall "was a remarkable example of courage and conviction, working tirelessly throughout her life to raise awareness about threats to wildlife, promote conservation, and inspire a more harmonious, sustainable relationship between people, animals and the natural world," the JGI statement reads.

Dame Valerie Jane Morris-Goodall was born April 3, 1934, in London. As a child, Goodall was fond of animals, including the 1920 book "The Story of Dr. Dolittle," and intrigued by the ecosystems of Africa. On a trip to Kenya in 1957, she met paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey, who convinced Goodall that studying the behavior of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) might provide insights into the behavior of early human ancestors.

Goodall began her research into chimpanzees in 1960 after arriving at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. With no formal academic training in a research area dominated by men at the time, Goodall spent months quietly observing the apes, giving them names such as Fifi, Passion and David Greybeard.

"It isn't only human beings who have personality, who are capable of rational thought, emotions like joy and sorrow," Goodall said in a 1996 PBS documentary.

In 1966, Goodall took a break from working at Gombe and completed a doctorate at the University of Cambridge. Her doctoral thesis detailed her years' worth of study at Gombe. One key observation that Goodall made at the national park was that chimpanzees were capable of making and using tools — she famously saw one of the apes strip a stick to "fish" for termites in a mound.

The discovery of chimpanzee tool-making counteracted the prevailing assumption at the time that only humans were intelligent enough to make tools. The revelation inspired Leakey to declare, "We must now redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as human!"

Goodall was the first person to document that chimps hunt and eat meat, revealing they are omnivores rather than the vegetarians scientists thought they were. She also saw chimps embrace one another in mourning after the death of a troop member and develop a kind of primitive language system.

But Goodall also documented disturbing behaviors never seen before, such as dominant females killing the young of other females.

"We found that chimpanzees can be brutal — that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature," Goodall wrote in her book "Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey" (Grand Central Publishing, 2000).

In the 1970s, Goodall became increasingly concerned about conservation efforts at Gombe and throughout Africa, and in 1977, she founded the non-profit Jane Goodall Institute. JGI maintains a presence at the Gombe Stream Research Centre — now the longest ongoing chimpanzee study in the world — and also helps teach young people around the world about environmental conservation.

Until her death, Goodall traveled the world nearly 300 days a year, speaking about wildlife conservation and environmental crises, according to the JGI statement. Her public lectures often began with "Dr. Jane" pant-hooting a chimpanzee greeting to her audience, and she would emphasize the collective power of individual actions for the benefit of the environment. In a 2002 essay published in Time Magazine, Goodall wrote that "the greatest danger to our future is apathy."

In a statement, Audrey Azoulay, director-general of UNESCO, said that "Dr. Jane Goodall was able to convey the lessons of her research to everyone, especially young people. She changed the way we see Great Apes. Her chimpanzee greetings at UNESCO last year — she who so strongly supported our work for the biosphere — will echo for years to come."

Goodall is survived by her sister, Judy Waters, her son, Hugo Eric Louis van Lawick, who was nicknamed "Grub" as a child, and three grandchildren. Grub spent his early years at Gombe, and Goodall's observations of chimpanzees helped her understand how to raise her son, she told People Magazine in 1977.

"The chimpanzees have an extremely close bond between mother and child," she said, "and I raised Grub this way."

During her 60 years of working with primates and spreading a message of environmental conservation, Goodall inspired other women to become scientists and received numerous awards, including Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1995), United Nations Messenger of Peace (2002), French Legion of Honour (2006), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which she was awarded in January 2025 by U.S. President Joe Biden.

Scientists in Australia are deep-freezing the shoot tips of a critically endangered tree to preserve its DNA in case the species goes extinct.

Only 380 specimens of the angle-stemmed myrtle (Gossia gonoclada) remain in the wild, with about 300 of them concentrated in the City of Logan area in southeast Queensland. If scientists manage to cryopreserve a diverse collection of genes from the species, there is a good chance they could resurrect it if it ever dies out, researchers said.

"The most important thing is preventing its continuing decline in the wild as this is where the plant is providing ecological functions and potentially cultural significance," Alice Hayward, a plant molecular physiologist at the University of Queensland who supervises the project, told Live Science in an email. But "by capturing and keeping alive the remaining diversity of this species in cryobanks it effectively provides a back up storage device for the species," Hayward said.

The angle-stemmed myrtle is a small tree that grows along waterways in Australia's dry rainforests. It has glossy leaves, square stems and sweet, fleshy fruit that may be a food source for bats and birds, Hayward said. "There has been limited research on its ecological interactions but it likely aids in river bank stability and biodiversity," she said.

A combination of habitat loss, rising temperatures and a deadly fungal disease called myrtle rust has drastically reduced the number of angle-stemmed myrtle plants in Australia since 2010. Myrtle rust is caused by the exotic fungus Austropuccinia psidii, which attacks the newly grown parts of trees and shrubs in the Myrtaceae family, deforming the plants' leaves, stunting their growth and decreasing their fertility.

To save the angle-stemmed myrtle from extinction, scientists are designing a method to freeze plant tissues that can later regenerate a full tree whenever needed. Although seeds contain reproductive material, they are not suitable for this project, both because of their reduced fertility from myrtle rust infections and because they likely won't survive long-term cryopreservation, Hayward said.

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So instead, Hayward and Jingyin Bao, a doctoral student at the University of Queensland, plan on preserving the angle-stemmed myrtle's shoot tips — the uppermost and actively growing parts of the plant — at ultra-low temperatures of minus 321 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 degrees Celsius).

This involves growing sterile shoots in a jelly and harvesting the tips before treating them with a cryoprotective solution and freezing them in liquid nitrogen, ABC News reported. Cryoprotective solutions protect plant cells during freezing by minimizing the formation of damaging ice crystals, Hayward said. Without these solutions, water inside the cells would expand, and the cells would burst; but with the solutions, the water turns "glassy" instead, she said.

The method already works for the sweet myrtle (Gossia fragrantissima), which is a small tree closely related to the angle-stemmed myrtle. After freezing sweet myrtle shoot tips, Bao achieved a 100% survival rate and managed to regrow all the plants, Hayward said. "We are transitioning this to gonoclada with some success and still working to improve the survival," she said.

Once the researchers land on a method for the angle-stemmed myrtle, they still need to make sure that they have enough genetic diversity in their samples to regrow a healthy population of trees.

"It is important that there is sufficient genetic diversity saved to provide the best chance of species survival in the future, especially if there happens to be any natural tolerance to myrtle rust or changing climate conditions," Hayward said. "Given the threats to this species in the wild due to habitat loss and invasive species including myrtle rust this needs to happen fast."

So far, Hayward and Bao haven't found any disease- or climate-resistant specimens in their sample, but City of Logan authorities and their partners are working to identify resistant individuals, Hayward said. "We want to preserve the most diverse individuals, whether tolerant or not, to provide a basis for future breeding," she explained.

And it's not just the angle-stemmed myrtle that needs preserving in this way, Hayward said. "We need Australia and the world to implement cryobanks to ensure we can bank the diversity of … foods and endangered plants for future generations," she said.

A large predator lurks in the brush, flashing a long tail and fur printed with telltale black and tan rosettes. It must surely be a leopard. Or … could it be a jaguar? With their stealthy hunting habits and similar builds, patterns and hues, the two large cats can be strikingly difficult to tell apart. What, in fact, is the difference between a leopard and a jaguar?

To begin with, they live in completely different parts of the world, with jaguars found in the Americas today, and leopards occurring across a large range spanning Africa, parts of the Middle East and Asia.

"They're on the opposite sides of the globe, but a long time ago they shared a common ancestor," Allison Devlin, jaguar program director for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, told Live Science.

Jaguars and leopards are part of the Panthera genus, which also includes lions, tigers and snow leopards. Tigers and snow leopards form their own branch of the Panthera family tree, while leopards, jaguars and lions are grouped together on another branch because they descend from a separate common ancestor.

However, between 3.6 million and 2.5 million years ago, jaguars split from the common ancestor shared by their leopard and lion cousins. The origins of the Panthera genus are uncertain, but fossil evidence shows that jaguars dispersed across the Eurasian plateau about 2 million years ago, and from here they migrated across the Bering Land Bridge during the last ice age to North America, and eventually down into Mexico through South America, where this species occurs today. In fact jaguars are the only Panthera lineage that occurs in the Western Hemisphere, and exist as just one species across their entire range, Devlin said.

Meanwhile, leopards split off from their closer relatives, lions, about 2 million years ago, and spread into Africa, Southeast and Northeast Asia, where they occur as eight regional subspecies across this range today. This evolutionary history means that leopards and jaguars are different species that aren't even each other's closest relative, despite their striking similarities.

Most noticeable among these common features is their spots, but even these have subtle differences that can be used to tell the animals apart.

"The rosettes on the jaguar quite often have spots in the middle of them, whereas the leopard doesn't," Tara Pirie, a lecturer in ecology and conservation at the University of Surrey in the U.K., told Live Science. She shared another clue: "[Leopard] rosettes are tightly packed, whereas the jaguar, with the spot in the middle, their rosettes are quite large and not as tightly packed."

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Their shared ancestry might partly explain why these two remote species both have spots. But it could also be an adaptive response to the environments they live in, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution, Devlin explained.

Rosettes, spots and other light-and-dark mixed patterns are in fact quite common in felid predators that live in partly-shaded landscapes, where their spots help keep them camouflaged. Jaguars and leopards both occur in places with partial forest cover, and both animals also rely on ambush tactics to hunt. So their coats provide critical camouflage enabling them to sneak up and pounce on prey at close range, Devlin said.

There are, however, some key differences in their hunting styles that also reveal striking physiological distinctions between the two animals.

"The way I think of it is that a leopard is built more like your all-around athlete. They can climb trees, they can run, they can ambush," Devlin said. "For jaguars, they're built more like a bodybuilder, where they're heavier in the barrel, in the chest and in the head. And part of that is related to their hunting techniques."

Jaguars are real heavyweights that can reach up to 260 pounds (120 kilograms). Their generally stockier frames include a much bulkier head than leopards have, formed by larger bones that support bigger muscles and give this animal some of the strongest jaws in the cat family, Devlin said.

Whereas most cats kill their prey through strangulation or breaking the neck, the jaguar's powerful bite gives it the extraordinary ability to kill its prey by puncturing the skull. Their bite is so strong that they can crush through the upper shells of tortoises and sea turtles, both of which they target as prey, Devlin explained.

On the other hand, at a much lighter 176 pounds (80 kg), leopards kill prey through suffocation, by biting the throat. Their smaller frames allow them to spring up into trees — something that jaguars can also do, although in general they spend far less time in trees. The leopard's arboreal preferences, meanwhile, have given them the advantage of being able to store or "cache" prey away from others' prying eyes, Pirie said.

Up in the canopy, the leopard's nimble-footed ways are helped along by another key tell that separates them from jaguars: a lengthier tail. "Whereas in the leopard, it could be up to a meter [3.2 feet long], in the jaguar it is maybe 60 centimeters [1.9 feet]. So even just that 40 centimeters [1.3 feet] could bring a lot more balance," Pirie said.

With these features as a guide, it's just about possible to tell leopards and jaguars apart. But nature has one more trick up her sleeve: all-black leopards and jaguars. The satiny sable coats on these animals are caused by a genetic mutation, and while they might look like it, they are not a different species. In fact, they're what's known as the "melanistic phase" of the species in each case, according to Devlin.

Interestingly, in both leopards and jaguars, these darker cats appear more commonly in heavily-shaded habitats. Black jaguars occur more in the dimly-lit depths of the Amazon rainforest, Devlin said.

Meanwhile "you've got leopards over in [the Malaysian jungle], they tend to be melanistic … which would help blend them in with that dense habitat," Pirie said.

The rarity of melanistic leopards and jaguars makes them even more vulnerable than their regularly-spotted siblings, who are threatened by hunting, shrinking habitats and the illegal wildlife trade. As a result, jaguars and leopards share the unfortunate fact that their populations are both in decline, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

But we have the tools to change that, Devlin said. "If they have the habitat, the prey and the protection that they need, they can persist."

In a world first, scientists have filmed a rare carnivorous snail laying an egg from a "genital pore" in its neck.

The footage answers long-standing questions about how the mysterious mollusks — known as the Mount Augustus snail (Powelliphanta augusta) — reproduce.

"It's remarkable that in all the time we've spent caring for the snails, this is the first time we've seen one lay an egg," Lisa Flanagan, a New Zealand Department of Conservation (DOC) ranger who captured the footage, said in a statement. "We caught the action when we were weighing the snail. We turned it over to be weighed and saw the egg just starting to emerge from the snail."

In the video, a single pearly white egg oozes out of the snail's slimy neck folds, from an opening known as a genital pore.

There are at least 20 species and 59 sub-species of Powelliphanta snails, and they are among the largest snails in the world, according to the DOC. Powelliphanta snails are nocturnal and rarely come out during the day, except when it is particularly rainy. Therefore, they are not often very rarely spotted by humans.

They are also among New Zealand's most threatened invertebrate species due to predation and habitat loss.

According to the DOC , P. augusta, only found on the Buller Plateau on New Zealand's West Coast, are threatened by extinction due to open-cast coal mining in their native range.

Because of their shrinking population and nocturnal behavior, very little is known about these creatures' life cycle and behavior. Therefore, wildlife officials have been studying a population in captivity for nearly 20 years.

"DOC has been managing this captive population in chilled containers in Hokitika since 2006, when work began to mine the majority of their habitat on the West Coast of the South Island," the DOC representatives said in a Facebook post. "Very little was known about the species before they were taken into captivity."

Like many snails, Powelliphanta are hermaphrodites, meaning they have both male and female reproductive organs. P. augusta are long-lived and slow to mature, only reaching sexual maturity at around 8 years old — which is very old for a snail. Mature snails usually lay around five eggs a year, which can take more than a year to hatch.

"Some of our captive snails are between 25 and 30 years old — in this they're polar opposites to the pest garden snail we introduced to New Zealand which is like a weed, with thousands of offspring each year and a short life," Kath Walker, DOC senior science advisor, said in the statement.

While the snails' hard shells help to protect them from predation and harsh conditions, they also make it difficult to get sperm from one snail into another. "Powelliphanta have solved this by having an opening (a genital pore) on the right side of their body just below their head so that the snail only needs to peek out of its shell to do the business," Walker said.

"It extends its penis out of this pore and into its mate's pore, and its mate does the same, simultaneously exchanging sperm, which they can store until they each fertilise the sperm they've received to create eggs," Walker said.

She added that, because they have both male and female reproductive organs, the snails can also self-fertilize.

Laying eggs through a genital pore is common among snail species, although some species, such as Littorina saxatilis in the U.K., give birth to live young. But Powelliphanta species are unusual because they only lay one egg at a time, rather than the big eggy clusters produced by many other more common snail species, according to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

To save these exotic snails, the DOC has established new populations in the wild by introducing them into new and rehabilitated habitats. However, they will continue to manage populations in captivity too until they are confident that the species is surviving well in the wild.

"The captive management of Powelliphanta augusta has not only saved the species from extinction, but it's allowed us to learn more about the lives of these incredible creatures found nowhere else in the world," according to the statement.

In an announcement on Monday (April 7), scientists revealed to the world that they have "brought back" long-extinct dire wolves with genetic engineering.

Researchers with the biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences shared images of three adorable, snow-white pups, which they said mark the "world's first de-extinction."

Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), which were made famous by the HBO television series "Game of Thrones," went extinct at the end of the last ice age. By creating lookalike pups, Colossal's CEO Ben Lamm said the company has "made healthy dire wolf puppies" and resurrected these predators after more than 10,000 years of extinction.

But many experts say the language used by Colossal to describe their creation is misleading. "What Colossal have produced is a gray wolf with dire wolf-like characteristics," Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and co-director of the Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory at the University of Otago, told the New Zealand Science Media Center (NZ SMC). "This is not a de-extincted dire wolf, rather it's a 'hybrid.'"

To make the pups, scientists extracted DNA from two prehistoric dire wolf fossils: a 13,000-year-old tooth discovered in Sheridan Pit, Ohio, and a 72,000-year-old inner ear bone from American Falls in Idaho. Using this DNA, the researchers pieced together a partial dire wolf genome, which they then compared with the genomes of the dire wolf's closest living relatives, including wolves, jackals and foxes.

Related: 'Closer than people think': Woolly mammoth 'de-extinction' is nearing reality — and we have no idea what happens next

Based on their results, the scientists selected the gray wolf (Canis lupus) as an egg donor to "bring back" dire wolves — despite the two species not actually being that closely related, experts said.

"New information shows that the original dire wolf itself was not really a wolf," David Mech, an adjunct professor specializing in wolf ecology and behavior at the University of Minnesota and senior research scientist with the U.S. Geological Survey, told Live Science in an email.

Evolutionarily speaking, dire wolves split from wolves roughly 6 million years ago, forming an entirely separate group from modern-day gray wolves. "Dire wolves are in their own genus, so a very different species," Philip Seddon, a professor of zoology at the University of Otago, told NZ SMC. "The African jackal might be more closely related to dire wolves."

"GMO wolves"

De-extinction requires egg cells from a living animal to hold and "grow" the genetic material of the animal scientists want to create. Having selected gray wolves to perform this step, Colossal scientists then collected cells from gray wolf blood samples and modified them to resemble the cells they found in the dire wolf fossils. Using CRISPR gene-editing technology, the team made a total of 20 edits in 14 genes that they identified as important in giving dire wolves their distinctive traits.

Next, in a similar process as the one used to clone Dolly the sheep in 1996, the scientists inserted the modified cells' DNA into gray wolf egg cells, whose own genetic material had previously been removed. At this point, the gray wolf egg cells contained all the genetic information required to build wolves with some of the defining characteristics of dire wolves. The egg cells were then left to mature in the lab, and the resulting embryos were implanted into the wombs of domestic dogs, which are technically a subspecies of the gray wolf.

Colossal's first "dire wolf" puppies, Romulus and Remus, were born Oct. 1, 2024, meaning they are now 5-month-old adolescents. According to Colossal, they are being held and continually monitored in a nature preserve surrounded by 10-foot-tall (3 meters) fencing.

"They will live out their life in a luxurious preserve under human care," Bridgett vonHoldt, a professor of evolutionary genomics and epigenetics at Princeton University who collaborates with Colossal on this project, told Live Science in an email. "As many have seen with previously cloned animals, their health always remains unpredictable and of potential concern."

A third pup, Khaleesi, was born Jan. 30, 2025. It's unclear how dangerous these animals are, but their behavior is unlikely to differ dramatically from that of a captive gray wolf, especially as they have been constantly surrounded by humans, vonHoldt said. "Lots of captive wolves are handled by humans. Some remain submissive with their humans even as adults while others mature into a more aloof, standoffish animal. I expect the DW [dire wolves] will be no different."

Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi will not be released into the wild, but in the future, Colossal said it will consider options to introduce animals into "secure and expansive ecological preserves potentially on Indigenous land."

But some experts doubt very much that these introductions would be successful. "Any release to the wild would be fraught with negative PR and legal consequences, which would probably also be the case with any of the other types of newly created animals," Mech said.

Regarding the dire wolf specifically, Mech said there is a question mark over how they might fit into modern ecosystems. "They occupied an entirely different ecological niche than exists today," he said.

Many experts have criticized Colossal's announcement, but some have also praised the technological breakthroughs the company made along the way. "Certainly, this involves advances in genetic technology, and these might have applications for the conservation of existing species," Seddon said.

One species that is already benefiting from Colossal's breakthroughs is the red wolf (Canis rufus), the world's most endangered wolf. The company announced the birth of two litters of cloned red wolves on Monday, boosting the number of red wolves held in captivity in the U.S. and offering new hope for the species.

But at the end of the day Colossal's claim that it has resurrected the dire wolf is spurious, Seddon and others said. "Colossal compared the genomes of the dire wolf and the gray wolf, and from about 19,000 genes, they determined that 20 changes in 14 genes gave them a dire wolf," Rawlence said.

Moreover, Colossal's "dire wolves" aren't technically the world's first de-extinction. In 2003, scientists in Spain cloned an extinct wild goat species known as the bucardo, or the Pyrenean ibex (Capra pyrenaica pyrenaica). A baby goat was born, but it died seven minutes later due to a lung defect.

The announcement on Monday means that "we have GMO wolves and might one day have GMO Asian elephants, but for now extinction really is for ever," Seddon said.

Incredibly rare footage has captured a mother snow leopard and her three cubs trudging through thick snow in the mountains of northern Pakistan.

Sakhawat Ali, a gamekeeper at the Central Karakoram National Park in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan, spotted the elusive animals on March 13 in a remote village called Hushe after two weeks of tracking their pugmarks [pawprints].

"Spotting four snow leopards is a great joy, as it indicates that the snow leopard population is increasing," Ali told Live Science.

Snow leopards (Panthera uncia) are an elusive species of big cat that can be found in mountainous areas across 12 countries in Central and Eastern Asia, and sightings are exceedingly rare. Their white coats render them almost invisible against the snowy mountains they call home, and more than 70% of their habitat remains unexplored, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Since late February, Ali said he had been noticing snow leopard pugmarks around the village. "While I was on the roof of my house, I used binoculars to observe the mountains and spotted a female snow leopard along with her four cubs," he said. "I quickly moved closer and filmed them from a distance of about 250 meters [820 feet]."

Related: 50 of the most endangered species on the planet

Snow leopards are usually solo travellers, so seeing four together is exceedingly rare.

"In the village [of Hushe] we are used to seeing snow leopards, but nobody, not even the elders that I spoke to, have ever seen four snow leopards in one go," Ali told CNN.

Female snow leopards typically have between one and five cubs with each litter, according to WWF. At three months old, the cubs begin to follow their mother out of their dens to learn how to hunt in their environment. However, they stay with their mothers until they are almost 2-years-old, according to San Diego Zoo.

The big cats are considered vulnerable to extinction, with only 4,000 to 6,000 individuals left worldwide, according to WWF estimates.

The Baltistan Wildlife Conservation and Development Organization (BWCDO), which shared Ali's video on Facebook, said the sighting was a positive sign of successful conservation efforts in the Hushe Valley area. However, the species still faces numerous threats.

According to the United Nations Environment Program, poaching, habitat fragmentation, prey depletion and climate change all threaten the snow leopard's existence.

Psychologists know that childhood trauma, or the experience of harmful or adverse events, can have lasting repercussions on the health and well-being of people well into adulthood. But while the consequences of early adversity have been well researched in humans, people aren't the only ones who can experience adversity.

If you have a rescue dog, you probably have witnessed how the abuse or neglect it may have experienced earlier in life now influence its behavior — these pets tend to be more skittish or reactive. Wild animals also experience adversity. Although their negative experiences are easy to dismiss as part of life in the wild, they still have lifelong repercussions — just like traumatic events in people and pets.

As behavioral ecologists, we are interested in how adverse experiences early in life can affect animals' behavior, including the kinds of decisions they make and the way they interact with the world around them. In other words, we want to see how these experience affect the way they behave and survive in the wild.

Many studies in humans and other animals have shown the importance of early life experiences in shaping how individuals develop. But researchers know less about how multiple, different instances of adversity or stressors can accumulate within the body and what their overall impact is on an animal's well-being.

Wild populations face many kinds of stressors. They compete for food, risk getting eaten by a predator, suffer illness and must contend with extreme weather conditions. And as if life in the wild wasn't hard enough, humans are now adding additional stressors such as chemical, light and sound pollution, as well as habitat destruction.

Given the widespread loss of biodiversity, understanding how animals react to and are harmed by these stressors can help conservation groups better protect them. But accounting for such a diversity of stressors is no easy feat. To address this need and demonstrate the cumulative impact of multiple stressors, our research team decided to develop an index for wild animals based on psychological research on human childhood trauma.

A cumulative adversity index

Developmental psychologists began to develop what psychologists now call the adverse childhood experiences score, which describes the amount of adversity a person experienced as a child. Briefly, this index adds up all the adverse events — including forms of neglect, abuse or other household dysfunction — an individual experienced during childhood into a single cumulative score.

This score can then be used to predict later-life health risks such as chronic health conditions, mental illness or even economic status. This approach has revolutionized many human health intervention programs by identifying at-risk children and adults, which allows for more targeted interventions and preventive efforts.

So, what about wild animals? Can we use a similar type of score or index to predict negative survival outcomes and identify at-risk individuals and populations?

Related: Why do some animals adopt other animals' young?

These are the questions we were interested in answering in our latest research paper. We developed a framework on how to create a cumulative adversity index — similar to the adverse childhood experiences score, but for populations of wild animals. We then used this index to gain insights about the survival and longevity of yellow-bellied marmots. In other words, we wanted to see whether we could use this index to estimate how long a marmot would live.

A marmot case study

Yellow-bellied marmots are a large ground squirrel closely related to groundhogs. Our research group has been studying these marmots in Colorado at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory since 1962.

Yellow-bellied marmots are an excellent study system because they are diurnal, or active during the day, and they have an address. They live in burrows scattered across a small, defined geographical area called a colony. The size of the colony and the number of individuals that reside within varies greatly from year to year, but they are normally composed of matrilines, which means related females tend to remain within the natal colony, while male relatives move away to find a new colony.

Yellow-bellied marmots hibernate for most of the year, but they become active between April and September. During this active period, we observe each colony daily and regularly trap each individual in the population — that's over 200 unique individuals just in 2023. We then mark their backs with a distinct symbol and give them uniquely numbered ear tags so they can be later identified.

Although they can live up to 15 years, we have detailed information about the life experiences of individual marmots spanning almost 30 generations. They were the perfect test population for our cumulative adversity index.

Among the sources of adversity, we included ecological measures such as a late spring, a summer drought and high predator presence. We also included parental measures such as having an underweight or stressed mother, being born or weaned late, and losing their mother. The model also included demographic measures such as being born in a large litter or having many male siblings.

Importantly, we looked only at females, since they are the ones who tend to stay home. Therefore, some of the adversities listed are only applicable to females. For example, females born in litters with many males become masculinized, likely from the high testosterone levels in the mother's uterus. The females behave more like males, but this also reduces their life span and reproductive output. Therefore, having many male siblings is harmful to females, but maybe not to males.

So, does our index, or the number of adverse events a marmot experienced early on, explain differences in marmot survival? We found that, yes, it does.

Experiencing even just one adversity event before age 2 nearly halved an adult marmot's odds of survival, regardless of the type of adversity they experienced. This is the first record of lasting negative consequences from losing a mother in this species.

So what?

Our study isn't the only one of its kind. A few other studies have used an index similar to the human adverse childhood experiences score with wild primates and hyenas, with largely similar results. We are interested in broadening this framework so that other researchers can adopt it for the species they study.

A better understanding of how animals can or cannot cope with multiple sources of adversity can inform wildlife conservation and management practices. For example, an index like ours could help identify at-risk populations that require a more immediate conservation action.

Instead of tackling the one stressor that seems to have the greatest effect on a species, this approach could help managers consider how best to reduce the total number of stressors a species experiences.

For example, changing weather patterns driven by global heating trends may create new stressors that a wildlife manager can't address. But it might be possible to reduce how many times these animals have to interact with people during key times of the year by closing trails, or providing extra food to replace the food they lose from harsh weather.

While this index is still in early development, it could one day help researchers ask new questions about how animals adapt to stress in the wild.

This edited article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rare footage captures the moment an eastern lowland gorilla breastfeeds her baby in the tropical rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

"To see this behaviour so close was remarkable and what struck me was how familiar it looks, just like humans," filmmaker Vianet Djenguet told Live Science in an email. "The infant was suckling whilst looking at us, like I have seen in so many villages across the world. The simplicity of life just hits you."

The clip was filmed for the Emmy- and Peabody-winning PBS series "Nature," with the first episode of the new season — "Silverback" — following Djenguet as he documents the lives of eastern lowland gorillas (Gorilla beringei graueri), a critically endangered subspecies of eastern gorillas (Gorilla beringei) found in the eastern part of the DRC.

Djenguet is working with DRC conservationists to habituate a group of gorillas in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park led by an alpha male known as Mpungwe. Habituation is the process of getting a group of gorillas used to the presence of humans so the animals can generate income from tourism, allowing visitors to safely view them in the forest.

The revenue generated from tourism in the region would be used to protect the species and pay for local community efforts to reduce poaching and deforestation.

Related: Wild gorillas in Gabon eat plants with antibacterial abilities against drug-resistant E. coli

Habituation is not a straightforward or quick process, however. It hinges on the male silverback of the group accepting humans, which can take years to achieve. This is the second attempt to habituate Mpungwe, according to the BBC. Mpungwe was raised by habituated gorillas but was orphaned when his family was killed during a civil war, the BBC reports. Over time, he built a family with wild gorillas, and is fiercely protective of them.

"Silverback" is the first time the process of habituation has been filmed, and capturing a mother gorilla breastfeeding shows the effort is working. "There is a big difference between habituated and wild gorillas," Djenguet said. "To film this [feeding] behaviour so close can only happen with the silverback allowing you to do so. He [Mpungwe] was watching us carefully. Many wild gorillas are not going to allow this as they have a deep fear of humans from many years of persecution."

Getting so close is risky.

"The silverback is a very real threat whilst filming a scene such as this," he added. "If he wants to, he can grab one of your feet and bite you or drag you along the ground until he is satisfied, by which time your limbs are possibly wrecked."

There are approximately 5,000 eastern lowland gorillas left in the wild. A female only has one infant every four to six years, making population recovery slow and difficult, especially with threats of disease and poaching.

"Should Mpungwe pass away or a war breaks out around that region, the forest will be a vulnerable spot," Djenguet said. "Eastern DRC is one of the richest places in the world in terms of natural resources. Hence the endless years of instability, conflict and plundering. It is the local communities and wildlife that bear the brunt, whilst many outsiders profit."

"Silverback" airs on PBS on Wednesday, Oct. 23. For times check local listings. It will also be available at pbs.org/nature and the PBS app. Select episodes will be available to stream on the Nature YouTube channel.

Great white sharks split into three distinct groups about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago and seldom mingled, a new study shows. The findings suggest that if one of these populations goes extinct, it cannot be replaced, the study authors said.

In the study, published July 23 in the journal Current Biology, scientists sequenced the genomes of 89 great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) sampled worldwide. Their results pointed to three distinct groups that diverged over time and did not interbreed. These groups are found in three locations: the North Atlantic/Mediterranean, Indo-Pacific and North Pacific oceans. 

"Now we understand that if you wipe out sharks in a particular area, they're not going to be repopulated by sharks from another lineage," study co-author Leslie Noble, a molecular evolutionary ecologist at Nord University in Norway, told Live Science. "The so-called global population of white sharks has now shrunk to these three very discreet units. And it's really quite concerning."

Like salmon, female sharks always return to their birth site to drop their pups, Noble said. This means that the sharks' mitochondrial DNA, which they inherit only from their mothers, "is a bit like a passport — it shows exactly where they come from," Noble said. Earlier studies have looked at white sharks' mitochondrial genome to study their genetic diversity. However, a portion of this maternal DNA is prone to mutation, making them unreliable references for tracing the lineage divergence.

In the new study, Noble and his team sifted through hundreds of thousands of genetic markers by analyzing variations of white shark DNA at a single nucleotide level — its basic building block. 

The scientists laid out the whole genome information of 89 white sharks sampled worldwide and grouped related genetic sequences using a statistical algorithm. They found that the sharks were segregated into three distinct populations. 

The team traced the history of these sharks by identifying when the genetic makeup of a shared ancestor began to diverge. These analyses suggested that the shark lineages split about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago during the Penultimate Glaciation Period — an ice age that saw sea levels fall up to 490 feet (150 meters) lower than current levels. 

It is still unclear why these populations split in the first place. Noble suspects the drop in sea level and changes in ocean currents and temperature may have created a biogeographical barrier for these sharks.

"We don't find genes moving across those [geographical] boundaries," Noble said. "That to us suggests that there must be some sort of a selection, which is making those different lineages adapted to the particular areas they're in."

Mysteriously, the only evidence of interbreeding was the presence of a hybrid shark — a mix of the Indo-Pacific and the North Pacific lineage — in the Bermuda Triangle. It is possible that more instances of interbreeding have occurred but that the offspring of these hybrids were lost through natural selection, Noble said. 

Related: Great White Sharks Gather in Droves in the Middle of Nowhere, But Why?

The International Union of Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the great white shark vulnerable to extinction. These sharks lost about a third of their population between 1970 and 2018, but thanks to global protection efforts, their populations are slowly increasing.

To Noble, the existence of three lineages means conservation efforts should focus on maintaining each unit of the white shark population. If one population starts to stray into another's territory, interbreeding could occur and produce offspring that may not survive. 

The disappearance of these apex predators would also have huge implications for humans. "Our fate is intimately bound with the great whites because we get about 20% of our protein from marine ecosystems, which the great whites keep healthy," Noble said. "So [if] we lose the great whites, we might lose a lot of our protein from these ecosystems."

U.S. wildlife officials plan to kill nearly half a million "invasive" American owls over three decades, new documents confirm. Experts say the cull is needed to help protect two native owl species, which have been put under threat from the invaders. However, animal rights activists have condemned the plan as cruel and unnecessary.

Barred owls (Strix varia) are large owls native to eastern North America. In the early 20th century, these owls started moving west of the Mississippi River following "human-induced changes" to the Great Plains and northern boreal forest, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). As a result, the owls have gained a stronghold in Washington, Oregon and California, where they are considered an invasive species.

The arrival of barred owls in the Northwest has adversely affected two native owl species — northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) and California spotted owls (Strix occidentalis occidentalis) — which are both much smaller than the invaders and are being outcompeted for food and territory. Both native species have also been impacted by extreme logging activity over the last few decades, which has majorly reduced their range, according to California's Santa Clara University.

Barred owls have also started mating with the spotted owls, creating hybrids that have the potential to reduce the gene pool of the spotted owl species.

The northern spotted owl population has declined severely over the past few decades, and the species is now outnumbered by barred owls across most of its range. The species is currently listed as threatened in the Endangered Species Act (ESA), which means the FWS is obligated to help protect the species. The FWS has also proposed that California spotted owls should be added to the ESA list because their numbers are also starting to decline.

On July 3, the FWS released its final Proposed Barred Owl Management Strategy following the completion of a public comment process. The documents reveal that the agency aims to remove around 450,000 barred owls, including barred-spotted owl hybrids, over a 30-year period. The plan could be officially confirmed by the end of this year.

Related: 10 times humans messed with nature and it backfired

This may sound like a huge number of owls. However, the cull will remove less than 1% of barred owls' predicted U.S. population during the proposed time frame, resulting in fewer casualties than other, more aggressive management options proposed by the FWS, which suggested culling almost twice as many of the birds. The cull will also be limited to around half the areas where barred and spotted owls overlap.

Officials hope this approach will help northern spotted owl populations recover and stop barred owls from spreading further south, which will safeguard California spotted owls. However, the plan should also enable barred owls to remain in the Northwest.

"It's not about one owl versus another," Kessina Lee, an FWS state supervisor in Oregon, said in a statement.

The cull will only be carried out by licensed hunters, and members of the public will not be permitted to shoot barred owls. The FWS report also notes that lead ammunition will not be used in the cull because of its impact on the environment.

However, not everyone is happy with the FWS plan.

In March, when a draft of the new management strategy was released, a group of at least 75 wildlife protection and animal welfare organizations wrote an open letter condemning the plan, labeling it as "colossally reckless" and "doomed to fail."

The critics believe that barred owls are being punished for human actions that enabled them to expand their range. They also note that owls are a notoriously hard animal to hunt, which could lead to cases of mistaken identity, where the wrong owl species and other forest animals are killed. As a result, these organizations suggest pursuing a non-lethal control approach. However, they did not specify what this alternative approach would be.

However, FWS officials say the cull is the best thing for all the species involved.

"Barred owl removal, like all invasive species management, is not something the service [FWS] takes lightly," Lee said in the statement. The service also has a legal responsibility to protect listed species, which spotted owls are and barred owls are not, she added.

The tidy classification of organisms into different species forms the foundation of modern biology. 

Yet the criteria used to differentiate a species is surprisingly fluid. In all, scientists have adopted at least 16 species definitions, and potentially as many as 32, to describe the roughly 2 million known species that exist today.

The upshot? 

That number is constantly changing as species are adjusted or reclassified on the basis of new evidence. Single species are often broken apart into multiple, and seemingly different species sometimes turn out to be the same.

From the African elephant to the orca, even seemingly popular and well-established animals have come under scrutiny. Here are six times when scientists seemed to get classifications wrong.

Manta ray

For hundreds of years, the manta ray was universally regarded as a single species, Manta birostris. Then, in 2009, University of Queensland graduate student Andrea Marshall published a paper differentiating the manta ray into two distinct species — the giant, or oceanic, manta ray (Mobula birostris) and the reef manta ray (Mobula alfredi) — based on consistent differences in their appearance. At the time, Marshall hinted at the possibility of a third species, and in 2020, researchers published genetic evidence backing her claim. While this new species has not yet been formally described, it is known colloquially as the Caribbean manta ray.

Florida panther

Deep in the Florida Everglades, lucky visitors might glimpse a flash of the state's largest and most endangered cat — the Florida panther. It's smaller than a typical cougar and has a kinked tail attributed to inbreeding among members of a shrinking population. 

And the big cat has courted controversy since its discovery in 1896. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, scientists vacillated between classifying the Florida panther as just another North American cougar (Puma concolor couguar) and giving it its own unique subspecies identification (P. c. coryi). In 2017, as part of a global effort to standardize the taxonomy of the world's felines, the Cat Classification Task Force went with the former, choosing to recognize all cougar populations in North America as P. c. couguar.

Reef fish

Coral reefs are among the most biodiverse habitats in the world. Every square inch is occupied, and every scrap of food is eaten. Given this intense competition for space and resources, species are driven to diversify in order to find new niches to exploit. This phenomenon, called adaptive radiation, can produce thousands of new species, many of which look extremely different from one another. But in other cases, species can appear so similar that the only way scientists can tell them apart is by looking at their DNA — a form of hidden biodiversity known as cryptic diversity. In a study published in February, scientists found that the DNA of a single species of tiny, sponge-dwelling fish called a goby held seven distinct genetic lineages that may represent new species, said senior/co author Jordan Casey, a molecular ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin's Marine Science Institute.

African elephant

The African elephant was once thought to be a single species. But in 2021, it was divided into the African savanna (or bush) elephant (Loxodonta africana) and the African forest elephant (Loxodonta cyclotis). 

And while scientists have previously argued that parsing species into ever-more groups can make it challenging for conservationists to direct resources, the African elephant is one example of how new data can actually make it easier. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — an organization that oversees the listing of threatened and endangered species — had previously listed the single species of African elephant as vulnerable, but splitting the group caused the African forest elephant to be reclassified as critically endangered, paving the way for new protections. 

Following population declines of over 86% in the past 30 years, some populations have now stabilized due to strict anti-poaching policies.

Orca

The orca, or killer whale, is a well-known example of speciation occurring in real time. While all of the estimated 50,000 orcas living today are currently lumped into a single species, Orcinus orca, there are at least 10 distinct ecotypes, each with their own distinct appearance, behavior and habitat. Resident killer whales, for example, tend to have smaller home ranges and specialize in eating fish, while transient orcas travel vast distances and feed on seals and other whales. These populations are currently diverging such that they struggle to communicate with one another or reproduce, prompting some scientists to push for a reclassification that would split the orcas into multiple species.

Giraffe

When famed Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus first described the gangly, bizarre-looking giraffe in 1758, he did so without ever actually having seen the animal. Yet, for hundreds of years, his classification of the giraffe as a single species (Giraffa camelopardalis) persisted. It wasn't until 2016, once scientists had access to cutting-edge genetics tools, that they realized the roughly 120,000 giraffes alive today may actually represent four different species. Their suggestion was contentious at the time and remains so today. The IUCN, for example, continues to list the giraffe as a single species with nine subspecies.

In 2016, scientists published a paper with a bold claim: that the giraffe, first described as a species by Swedish biologist Carl Linnaeus in 1758, might actually have been four species all along. Unlike Linneaus, the researchers had access to modern genetic tools, which revealed that giraffes fall into distinct clusters based on differences in their DNA, some of which are "larger than the differences between brown bears and polar bears," the authors said at the time.

The news sent ripples through the giraffe conservation community, which suddenly needed to protect four species instead of one. But from the start, there was disagreement about this new classification, and even today, the International Union for Conservation of Nature — an organization that oversees the listing of threatened and endangered species — lists the giraffe as a single species, Giraffa camelopardalis, with nine subspecies.

The dustup and others like it highlight the "species problem," a fundamental uncertainty over how we parse organisms, and it continues to rile biologists the world over.

Arguments often hinge on decades-old definitions. In 1942, biologist Ernst Mayr coined what is perhaps the most enduring one: the biological species concept, which labels two organisms as different species if they cannot reproduce and create fertile offspring. Researchers have since established definitions on the basis of shared ancestry (the phylogenetic species concept), physical features (the morphological species concept), or shared ecology (the ecological species concept), wherein species diverge as they take over different niches in their environment. In all, there are at least 16 species definitions, and potentially as many as 32, circulating among scientists today.

No definition seems to be without exception, however. There are species in which individuals look very different from one another, as well as "cryptic species" that appear identical but are genetically distinct. Hybridization is also common, leading to animals like the liger (a lion-tiger hybrid) and the beefalo (a cross between domestic cattle and the American bison). Evidence even suggests that humans once bred with two other ancient hominins that are usually considered separate species, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans, suggesting they might not have been so different from us after all.

Related: 'More Neanderthal than human': How your health may depend on DNA from our long-lost ancestors

"Some of the rules that we set don't work, and it gets quite messy sometimes," Jordan Casey, a marine molecular ecologist at the University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute, told Live Science. "Humans inherently want to put order on things, and even I have to make a lot of decisions about whether I'm just seeing diversity between individuals or trying to bend things needlessly into different species."

But pinning down the definition of a species isn't just an academic exercise — many of the world's conservation policies are structured around species as the de facto unit of conservation. Ultimately, it poses more existential questions as well. If there are four species of giraffe, after all, does it really matter if one goes extinct?

To answer these questions, groups are now coming together to establish guidelines for how species should be named and ordered across the tree of life and how to handle disputes when they arise. Indeed, coming up with a working list of agreed-upon rules is crucial, even if it's not perfect, biologists say.

"It gets quite messy"

The concept of a species is an ancient one. In 343 B.C., for instance, Aristotle wrote "History of Animals," in which he described differences between individual animals as well as between groups.

But it wasn't until the mid-1700s that the concept of taxonomy — the formal classification of living things — truly took off and was turned into an official discipline by Linnaeus. Taxonomy blossomed for a time as scientists across the globe began naming new species, but as the field and related ones advanced, conflicts inevitably emerged.

Scientists have officially described around 2 million species, and others are constantly being added or reclassified based on new evidence. Even for large, seemingly well-studied animals, adjustments are fairly common, and iconic animals like the giraffe, African elephant and orca have come under review.

The problem is that scientists can't agree on a universal definition that can classify organisms as diverse and dissimilar as mammals, birds, fish, plants and bacteria. Still others argue whether such an exercise is even useful, noting that scientists have carried on in the absence of consensus for centuries and will still need to do so as the world's creatures are lost at a staggering rate.

"We're losing things before we even have a name on them, and so we absolutely need to keep pushing in order to advance our conservation goals," Terry Gosliner, an evolutionary biologist and taxonomist at the California Academy of Sciences who has discovered thousands of species over his decades-long career, told Live Science. "But in some cases, we also need to set aside the question of what a species is in order to move forward in meaningful ways."

Today's scientists are tackling the species problem in different ways. Some are attempting to reconcile existing definitions with modern methods, such as by rebranding Mayr's biological species concept as the genetic species concept, which still suggests an inability to reproduce but links the mechanism specifically to genetic incompatibility.

Others continue to develop new ideas. Jeannette Whitton, an evolutionary biologist at the University of British Columbia, codeveloped the retrospective reproductive community concept. Rather than adopting a strict definition, this concept encourages scientists to embrace uncertainty and acknowledge that speciation is a continuous process — that organisms we observe today were shaped by past forces.

Taking this holistic view, which incorporates facets of several existing definitions, means that scientists can still make predictions or explain natural phenomena even in the absence of a clear definition. Whitton told Live Science it took her and a colleague seven years to settle on the final language, in part because of how challenging it was to reconcile their own conflicting ideas.

Still others have argued for setting the species problem aside, noting that the question itself might be a distraction. Yuichi Amitani, a senior associate professor of biology at the University of Aizu in Japan, noted in 2022 that scientists' fears that a lack of consensus would lead to communication breakdowns and make it impossible to compare research have not come to pass.

"There are many concepts in science that lack a unified meaning, and we still manage just fine in that space of uncertainty," he told Live Science, adding that there seems to be something about the idea of a species "that excites such a strong emotional reaction."

Confronting "taxonomy anarchy"

In many ways, conservation is where those emotions boil over, with fierce debates playing out in the scientific literature. In 2017, Leslie Christidis, a taxonomist at Southern Cross University in Australia, argued in a paper that biology's ongoing explosion of newly described species — what he dubbed "taxonomy anarchy" — was making it challenging for conservationists to direct resources or rally support.

Christidis told Live Science that this idea was indeed contentious, prompting more than 180 scientists to cosign a public rebuke. But Christidis insists he never meant to suggest that taxonomy has no place in conservation. Instead, he said, he was advocating for a unified framework for naming new species and managing disputes.

Indeed, as scientists develop more sophisticated tools that combine taxonomy with genomics, tagging studies, modeling and even machine learning, it's clear that the optimal solution likely isn't a one-size-fits-all definition.

It's not even true that probing for new species inevitably leads to more species. When Thomas Near, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University, investigates the evolutionary histories of fish, he often finds that separate species, including several popular sport fish, are in fact the same.

"We have to let the science lead us where it will, and that's not always necessarily to more species," Near told Live Science.

Working groups are now attempting to establish new guidelines. The Catalogue of Life, for example, is developing rules for naming within each kingdom of life, while other groups are carving out even smaller pieces of the puzzle. The World Register of Marine Species is tracking marine species, while the Cat Specialist Group is reassessing the taxonomy of the world's felids.

Christidis is leading an effort to merge three existing lists of bird species and hopes to release a report later this year. After a controversial 2016 paper doubled the number of bird species based on a new definition, the field was clearly due for a reckoning, he said. Fortunately, the group's efforts are revealing that "it is often possible to reach consensus — if not universal agreement — once all of the evidence has been presented," he said. From there, it's easier to make judgments on which species are most in need of protection.

"As scientists, we all want to protect our biodiversity," Christidis said, "and I think starting from that shared ground has helped tremendously."

 The planet's last surviving mammoth population was killed by a random and sudden mystery event, a new study has revealed.

The population, isolated from the rest of the world for 6,000 years on Wrangel Island in what is now extreme northern Russia, was previously believed to have been slowly wiped out by genetic inbreeding.

But a new study has found that the population — which grew from at most eight individuals to 300 before its demise 4,000 years ago — did not go extinct for genetic reasons. This leaves an even bigger mystery as to what actually happened. The researchers published their findings June 27 in the journal Cell.

"We can now confidently reject the idea that the population was simply too small and that they were doomed to go extinct for genetic reasons," study senior author Love Dalén, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics in Stockholm, said in a statement. "This means it was probably just some random event that killed them off, and if that random event hadn't happened, then we would still have mammoths today."

From about 300,000 to 10,000 years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the frigid plains of Europe, Asia and North America. As the ice across these northern regions melted, the Arctic tundra that the giant pachyderms relied on for food disappeared. This caused the mammoths' range to shrink until they eventually disappeared.

But sometime during this timeframe, a small group of mammoths crossed the ice on the northwest coast of Siberia and began to inhabit Wrangel Island, becoming cut off from the population on the mainland once the ice bridge disappeared around 10,000 years ago. Secluded on the frozen island, the mammoths there survived for an additional 6,000 years.

Related: 'Archaeological sensation': Winemaker discovers hundreds of mammoth bones while renovating his cellar

Because Wrangel Island's mammoths originated from at most eight individuals, scientists previously believed that harmful mutations due to inbreeding could have caused the animals' demise.

To look into the consequences of the Wrangel Island bottleneck, the researchers in the new study used DNA extracted from bones and tusks to analyze the genomes of 21 mammoths — 14 from the island and seven from the mainland population before the bottleneck occurred.

They found that the island's woolly mammoths did show signs of inbreeding and low genetic diversity, but their mutations were only moderately harmful, and the most dangerous ones were slowly being purged from their genome.

"If an individual has an extremely harmful mutation, it's basically not viable, so those mutations gradually disappeared from the population over time," study first author Marianne Dehasque, an evolutionary geneticist at the Centre for Palaeogenetics, said in the statement. "But on the other hand, we see that the mammoths were accumulating mildly harmful mutations almost up until they went extinct."

With inbreeding ruled out, the real cause of these woolly mammoths' demise is still unknown, the researchers said.

"What happened at the end is a bit of a mystery still — we don't know why they went extinct after having been more or less fine for 6,000 years, but we think it was something sudden," Dalén said. "I would say there is still hope to figure out why they went extinct, but no promises."

To investigate further, the researchers will look for clues in unearthed mammoth fossils from the population's final 300 years on the island. In the meantime, the scientists say their findings are useful for understanding the ongoing diversity crisis, as the mammoth's grim fate is mirrored by many present-day populations.

"It's important for present-day conservation programs to keep in mind that it's not enough to get the population up to a decent size again," Dehasque said. "You also have to actively and genetically monitor it because these genomic effects can last for over 6,000 years."

Japan's commercial whaling activities could soon expand to include fin whales, government officials announced last week.

The move, which experts have heavily condemned, would increase the number of whale species Japan hunts in its territorial waters to four; the other three species are the Bryde's whale (Balaenoptera edeni), the sei whale (Balaenoptera borealis) and the minke whale (Balaenoptera acutorostrata). 

For now, it appears the decision to include fin whales hinges on public approval of changes to the country's marine resource management policy, according to the marine conservation organization OceanCare. 

The fin whale (Balaenoptera physalus) is the second-largest whale species on Earth, after the blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus). Fin whales are named for the distinctive fin that protrudes from their lower back, and they can grow up to 85 feet (26 meters) long. They are found across all the world's oceans. In the first half of the 20th century, however, fin whale populations nose-dived due to commercial whaling and they are still recovering from the shock, according to the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which regulates modern whaling practices.

In 1982, the IWC introduced a moratorium on commercial whaling that went into effect in 1986. Although Japan stopped commercial hunts after 1986, the country resumed taking whales for what it said was scientific research one year later. In 2019, Japan withdrew from the IWC and began catching whales commercially once again, although its whaling activities are now restricted to the country's territorial waters in the North Pacific Ocean.

Related: Hidden DNA found in blue whales reveals they've been mating with other species — and their hybrid offspring

On May 9, officials announced that Japan could start hunting fin whales soon. "Whales are important food resources and should be sustainably utilized, based on scientific evidence," Yoshimasa Hayashi, Japan's minister for foreign affairs, said at a news conference.

According to the IWC's most recently published whaling data, Japan took 25 sei whales, 187 Bryde's whales and 58 minke whales in 2022. In recent years, the country has also imported fin-whale meat from Iceland, according to OceanCare. 

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists fin whales as vulnerable to extinction globally, although the species was still listed as endangered as recently as 2018 and is considered as such under the Endangered Species Act of 1973. However, there is insufficient data to pinpoint the status of local populations in the North Pacific, according to the IWC. 

Without reliable population estimates, Japan's move to hunt fin whales is an "appalling step backward" for ocean protection, Clare Perry, a senior adviser at the Environmental Investigation Agency (an international NGO that investigates environmental crime and abuse), said in a statement. 

"Fin whales are one of Earth's great carbon capturers and should be fully protected, not least so that they can continue to fulfill their critical role in the marine environment," Perry said.

The announcement comes after Japan unveiled a brand-new whaling "mother ship" in March. The factory ship, called the Kangei Maru, can handle and process large whales, including fin whales, "which could tie Japan into decades more of this destructive, unsustainable, inhumane and outdated industry," Perry said.

Whether or not Japan goes ahead with its plans to hunt fin whales depends on the outcome of a public consultation of the country's newly drafted whaling policy — but it seems likely the changes will be approved, according to OceanCare.

For millennia, grey wolves prowled North America, living in harmony with the natural world around them. But as the human population grew across the continent, farmers and ranchers, fearing these clever hunters would prey on their livestock, hunted and killed these majestic animals in their thousands. In 1926, a shot rang out over Yellowstone Park, and with it the last of the native grey wolves, who once roamed this spectacular wilderness, was dead.

The consequences of these actions spread much further than anyone had imagined, with elk, no longer fearing a natural predator, overrunning the landscape and leaving it barren, while emboldened coyotes fed on the smaller animals that would once have sustained other predators.  

But Yellowstone today is different. It has at least eight packs of wolves that run freely across the park, all thanks to the rewilding efforts to bring them back to where they once lived, and restore a natural order to the environment.

This remarkable tale is one of 20 beautifully illustrated stories that are perfect for young children in the new book "Rewild the World at Bedtime" by Emily Hawkins and illustrator Ella Beech, in which we discover how humans have worked with nature to bring animals back to the lands where they once lived. 

In this excerpt, we learn how the war that engulfed the nation of Mozambique decimated the wildlife of the Gorongosa National Park, and the remarkable efforts to bring elephants and other African fauna back to this beautiful landscape. 

As the red sun drops toward the horizon, a herd of elephants gather by a lake, their reflections mirrored in the calm water. On the far side of the pool, a jeep approaches across the dusty savannah. The driver is a young woman called Dominique: a scientist whose job is to learn about and protect these majestic beasts. She switches off the engine and reaches for her binoculars. 

Dominique watches as the leader of the herd flaps her ears, raises her trunk, and lets out a bellow of alarm. This wise mother elephant is protective of her family, and is wary of people. She has a long memory. She remembers a time not so many years ago when this place, Gorongosa, was a battleground. 

In the 1960s, Gorongosa National Park thrummed with wildlife. People came from across the globe to gaze at lions and leopards, rhinos and elephants. This vast landscape was a paradise of lush green flood plains, grassy savannahs, wetlands, woodlands, and mountains. 

But then, a dark shadow fell across the land. In the 1970s, the country of Mozambique was torn apart by a devastating civil war, which raged for sixteen years. The fighting spread into the park as the land was claimed first by one side, then the other. The war took a toll on the wildlife. Zebra and wildebeest were hunted for their meat, while elephants were killed for their valuable tusks, which were sold to buy weapons and supplies. 

When the war finally ended, the park was unrecognizable. Roads had been destroyed, buildings had been reduced to rubble, and the ground was littered with the bones of lost creatures. Most of Gorongosa’s large animals had died.

Where once there had been more than two thousand elephants, now there were fewer than two hundred. The buffalo had vanished, and the rhinos, leopards, and lions had been wiped out. The landscape had changed too. Without the grazing animals, the grasses had grown tall and a thorny shrub had taken hold, sprawling across the plains in dense thickets. 

But now that the fighting was over, both the people and the wildlife could begin to heal. The managers of the park tried to unite the local community, hiring ex-soldiers from both sides of the war as park rangers. They patrolled the savannahs, scaring off poachers and removing the deadly traps and snares left behind. Nature breathed a sigh of relief and, gradually, the wildlife began to return. However, the recovery was slow and the park was short of money to fix its problems.

In 2004, an American businessman called Greg Carr visited Mozambique. He had made a fortune in computer software, and he wanted to give back to a good cause. Greg fell in love with Gorongosa, and invested millions of dollars in helping the park recover. With his support, the park had enough money not only to bring back the animals, but also to build schools and provide healthcare and jobs for the people who lived in and around Gorongosa. 

Over the next few years, many different plants and animals returned to the area, and scientists were hired to research these varied species. One of the new staff was Dominique. She had been born in the nearby city of Beira just as the war was ending. She’d grown up with a love of science, and had studied ecology and conservation at university. When Dominique heard about the exciting work taking place at Gorongosa, she knew that she had to be part of it. She landed a job on the scientific team, and she is now an expert on the park’s elephants.

These mighty creatures are crucial to Gorongosa's recovery. With their lumbering bodies and powerful trunks, they transform landscapes. As a herd passes through, they munch on tall grasses and chomp at thorny shrubs, making space for antelopes and other grazers. But, as Dominique would learn, although the elephant population is recovering, there are still challenges to face. Part of her job is to find ways for humans and elephants to live alongside each other happily. 

Sometimes these creatures come into conflict with the people who live nearby. On Gorongosa’s southern border is a river that the elephants occasionally cross, visiting farms to raid and trample the crops. To solve this problem, staff and local people put up fences made from roped-together beehives to protect the farms. If the elephants disturb the fence, the bees become agitated and sting them, until they back off. These clever hives, as well as keeping the elephants away, provide the farmers with honey to eat and sell. Projects like this, where both the wildlife and the human communities benefit, are vital to Gorongosa.  

Today, as Dominique watches the herd cooling off at the lake, she is filled with hope for the future. In the thirty years that have passed since Mozambique’s civil war ended, much has changed for the better. Wildlife populations in Gorongosa have rebounded, local people are happier, and this vibrant place is now home to a breathtaking variety of animals and plants, as well as a close-knit community of people who are dedicated to taking care of them.  

Rewild the World at Bedtime by Emily Hawkins, illustrated by Ella Beech © Wide Eyed Editions, 2024

Scientists have made a stem cell breakthrough in elephants, which could mean researchers are one step closer to bringing back long-extinct woolly mammoths, the de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences has announced.

In a statement shared with Live Science, Colossal's Woolly Mammoth team says it has successfully derived induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from Asian elephants (Elephas maximus). iPSCs are cells that have been reprogrammed so they can give rise to any cell type in the body, meaning researchers will now be able to investigate the adaptations that differentiate woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) from their closest living relatives and test gene edits without having to take tissue from living animals.

"These cells definitely are a great benefit to our de-extinction work," Eriona Hysolli, the head of biological sciences and mammoth lead at Colossal Biosciences, told Live Science. What's crucial about them, Hysolli said, is that they can reveal the cellular and genetic processes behind features that helped woolly mammoths thrive in the Arctic. These features include shaggy hair, curved tusks, fat deposits and a dome-shaped cranium. 

iPSCs also open a path to creating elephant sperm and egg cells, which are essential for mammoth de-extinction, in the lab. With fewer than 52,000 Asian elephants left in the wild, according to WWF, harvesting cells from these animals would prove difficult and undesirable.

Previously, deriving elephant iPSCs proved challenging because these animals have a complex gene pathway not found in other species. The researchers overcame this by suppressing core genes called TP53 that regulate cell growth and prevent cells from duplicating indefinitely, Hysolli said.

Related: 'That's a huge amount of movement for a single mammoth': Woolly female's steps retraced based on chemistry of 14,000-year-old tusk

"One of the things that we had to overcome for elephant cells is that they do have this expansive TP53 pathway," Hysolli said. "We had to suppress this pathway via two means in order to get these iPSCs, so we had to go through a multistep process in order to achieve them."

The breakthrough may also shed light on early development in elephants, which is currently considered the biggest hurdle to woolly mammoth de-extinction. If researchers succeed in creating a woolly mammoth embryo by fusing ancient mammoth DNA with elephant cells, they will need to implant this embryo into an elephant surrogate to complete a 22-month gestation period. "Elephant gestation is so long and complex, so really understanding the developmental biology aspect of elephant biology is so important," Hysolli said. 

Engineering a woolly mammoth embryo no longer poses a huge challenge, Hysolli said, but birthing a healthy calf will take more time and work. The team is still researching alternative methods to generate elephant iPSCs and maturing the ones they have newly developed. The iPSCs breakthrough, which will be published on the preprint database bioRxiv, has yet to be peer-reviewed.

"There is more validation to be done, so until you do the experiment you can never be sure, but we think that the pluripotency potential [to differentiate into any cell type] is fully there," Hysolli said.

This is an important breakthrough and an essential step to create a woolly mammoth-like elephant, said Vincent Lynch, a developmental biologist and associate professor at the University at Buffalo in New York who was not involved in Colossal's work. "The goal, I think, is to turn these iPSCs into sperm and eggs, which would allow for in vitro fertilization and, eventually, surrogacy," Lynch told Live Science in an email. "Those methods are pretty challenging and haven’t been developed yet, but it is only a matter of time."

Reprogramming elephant cells into iPSCs has applications beyond woolly mammoth de-extinction, according to the statement. The technology could provide a boost to elephant conservation, for example, by enabling researchers to produce and fertilize reproductive cells artificially.

"We can derive gametes, so oogonia and spermatogonia-like cells, from these pluripotent stem cells," Hysolli said. "And that's crucial over the longer term, because they can really hold the key to saving species."

Scientists are planting "living fossil" trees in secret locations in a bid to bring back the lost species from the brink of extinction — an effort that could take centuries. 

Wollemi pines (Wollemia nobilis) were believed to have disappeared some 2 million years ago. Fossils of the species dating the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) show they have barely changed in appearance since this time. 

But in 1994, hikers in Australia's Blue Mountains stumbled upon a relict stand of these ancient conifers. Now, only around 60 of them remain in Wollemi National Park. They are threatened by Phytophthora cinnamomi, a pathogenic water mold that causes dieback, and by rampant wildfires that intermittently rage through this region of New South Wales.

Since its rediscovery, wollemi pines have been grown in botanical gardens and private spaces around the world. And the Wollemi Pine Recovery Team, a partnership between Australian government scientists and conservationists, has begun the process of reintroducing seedlings to three sites in Wollemi National Park.

Related: Living fossils — 12 creatures that look the same now as they did millions of years ago

"The sites comprise high-elevation sandstone gorges that are sufficiently deep, narrow and steep-sided to provide refugia from frequent, intense wildfires and drought," representatives said in a statement emailed to Live Science. "There was no evidence of infection with pathogenic Phytophthora species at either site when surveyed immediately prior to the translocations, and there is a low (but non-zero) likelihood of unauthorized visitation due to their remoteness."

Following a pilot transplantation effort in 2012, the recovery team initiated a more intensive project in 2019. Over 400 saplings were transplanted at two sites and — due to drought conditions — the team later hauled several thousand gallons of water to the plants in order to help them survive. Later that year, a substantial number of the trees were destroyed by bushfires. Only 58 saplings made it to 2023.

In 2021, 502 more Wollemi pines were planted at the sites to replace those lost in the fires. "Survival has greatly exceeded expectations, due in part to several years of favorable La Niña conditions following the 2021 population augmentations," the researchers said. La Niña is a periodic climate pattern that features colder-than-average waters in the central and east-central equatorial Pacific. Increased rainfalls due to the climatic phenomenon benefited the new transplants—but that seems to be coming to an end. Landslides caused by heavy rains in 2022 led to further fatalities but more than 80% survived. More will be planted in 2024.

The team has taken extensive steps to prevent introduction of Phytophthora to the sites. Their locations are concealed from the public and even the reintroduction team limits their time near the plants. They repeatedly disinfect their shoes to reduce the likelihood they will track in traces of the water mold. Even a few spores might spell death for this nascent population.

They have also intentionally located some of the young trees in areas that might be subject to bushfires "to help address knowledge gaps regarding their response and ability to tolerate fire," the team said.

While the new populations are being intensively monitored, the fate of the species in the wild is far from assured. The young trees grow less than 0.4 inches (1 centimeter) a year, so it will take decades for them to reach maturity and produce seeds. Some may produce offshoots in the meantime, though when they may begin propagating themselves in this fashion remains unknown. 

Fires and other climate-related issues such as reduced rainfall are likely to interfere with the restoration effort in the coming years. The scientists view their effort as a multi-generational one: a new cohort of stewards will need to take their place in the ensuing decades. 

"To be successful, the translocated populations must become self-sustaining, and the benchmark is the appearance of second-generation seedlings," the researchers said. "Given the slow growth and maturation of Wollemi pines in the wild, this is likely to take many decades, if not centuries. Given predicted increases in the frequency and severity of fire and drought due to climate change — arguably the two greatest threats to these populations — their long-term security is far from guaranteed."

For the first time, scientists have spotted South Asian fishing cats climbing tall trees to raid bird nests — displaying a rare and highly unusual behavior. 

The researchers made the unexpected discovery using motion cameras set up in tree canopies in northeast Bangladesh, which captured 19 instances of nocturnal predation by fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) on two different wetland bird colonies in northeast Bangladesh. 

"South Asian wetlands are heavily anthropized, often transformed for aquaculture or free-ranging duck pens, so the fishing cat might have an unknown dependency on the wetland bird colonies," said study co-author Muntasir Akash, an assistant professor in zoology at the University of Dhaka in Bangladesh. "Although fishing cats primarily feed on fish, there are reports of it taking waterbirds such as moorhens, herons, egrets and cormorants," Akash told Live Science.

Scientists observed 282 days' worth of footage to gain insight into fishing cats' foraging patterns and human-cat interactions, when they spotted the unusual behavior. 

In one case, researchers observed a cat biting the neck of a little cormorant (Microcarbo niger) chick in a nest in the canopy of a 26-foot-tall (8 meters) Indian oak tree (Barringtonia acutangular). 

Related: Adorable but deadly little wildcat may be inbreeding at 'alarming' rates, study finds

As the name suggests, fishing cats mostly eat fish and they have several adaptations that help them catch their aquatic prey, including two layers of water-resistant fur, semi-retractile claws and partially webbed forepaws.

According to the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance, these cats hunt by wading into shallow water to scoop fish out with their paws, or dive headfirst into deeper water to grab prey with their teeth. 

Despite these adaptations, fishing cats still retain many typical feline features that scientists say could aid their survival during monsoon season, when their usual water-based hunting grounds are flooded or destroyed. "In monsoon season, almost the whole country becomes a wetland. So, where do they go at that time?" Akash said. "It is a mystery, but the general answer would be the village groves [where the waterbirds can be found]." 

The species is currently rated as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and their numbers are declining. 

In addition to climate challenges, fishing cats also face conflicts with humans as they are frequently hunted or driven away from fertile fishing areas by people. 

However, scientists say this latest evidence shows how fishing cats could survive during the rainy season, and that an ability to hunt birds in the tree canopy could provide vital shelter and an alternative food source. 

The researchers say the findings could aid conservation efforts, as this new evidence suggests fishing cats might depend on the wetland bird colonies that are vulnerable to hunting and tree felling. "A stable population of wetland bird colonies might be a win-win for the wetland, fishing cats and the local people who depend on the wetlands," Akash said.

For the first time, researchers have successfully used a form of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) to impregnate a female white rhinoceros. This breakthrough means there is a slim chance the "doomed" northern white rhino could still be saved, despite there being no known males left alive. Other critically endangered rhino species could also benefit.

The scientists used an embryo transfer technique that's very similar to IVF used in humans. The technique involves scientists taking the gametes, or sex cells, from a male and female rhino and combining them artificially to create an embryo — a fertilized egg that has started developing. The embryo is then transplanted into a surrogate female and, if everything goes to plan, she will become pregnant and give birth. 

The transfer usually takes place after the mother-to-be has mated with a barren male so that both parents will think the offspring is their own and raise it after it is born. The same technique has been used in dogs and as part of the process to clone horses and create a cloned wolf born to a beagle surrogate.       

In 2019, the international consortium BioRescue began exploring the possibility of using this technique to save one of the world's rarest subspecies — the northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni). After the death of the species' last known male "Sudan" in 2018, there are just two known females left on the planet — a mother and daughter pair named Najin and Fatu, who are both protected by armed guards at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. 

Without any males left to father new offspring, northern white rhinos are "functionally extinct," meaning it is only a matter of time before they are wiped out. 

Related: Which animals could go extinct by 2050?

In September 2023, BioRescue scientists took their biggest step yet to prove the technique can work in white rhinos by implanting two embryos into a southern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum simum) — a closely related rhino subspecies that is also critically endangered. The embryos were created from the gametes, or sex cells, of captive southern white rhinos in Belgium and Austria and were implanted into a surrogate that also lives in Ol Pejeta Conservancy.

Now, scientists have revealed that the procedure led to a successful pregnancy. However, the team only discovered the pregnancy during a necropsy of the mother-to-be, Curra, who died from a bacterial infection in November 2023. The infection was caused by flood water and was unrelated to the embryo transfer procedure.

Scientists retrieved the lifeless 70-day-old fetus from the dead rhino's womb. The remains measured just 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) long.

Despite the rhino's death, the BioRescue team is very optimistic about completing more embryo transfers in the future. 

"We are overwhelmed that we now have proof that this technique works perfectly," Thomas Hildebrandt, a reproductive biologist at the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Germany and project leader at BioRescue, said in a statement. "It is bitter that this milestone is confirmed under such tragic circumstances… but I am certain that this proof-of-concept is a turn of the tide for the survival of the northern white rhino."

If Curra had not died, the chances of a successful birth were around 95%, Cesare Galli, a veterinarian and CEO of Avantea Laboratories, which studied the fetus' remains, said in the statement. Most complications with embryo transfers occur in the first 50 days, he added, so once they are past this point, pregnancies normally come to term.

The BioRescue team will attempt another southern white rhino embryo transfer later this year. But soon the scientists hope to try out the procedure on Najin and Fatu.

BioRescue has already created 30 viable northern white rhino embryos using frozen sperm collected from dead males and eggs from Fatu. Hildebrandt says that the first embryos will be transplanted into the living females within the next few years. However, The Guardian reported that this could happen as soon as May or June this year. 

It is also hoped that embryo transfer could help increase the numbers of Sumatran rhinos (Dicerorhinus sumatrensis) in Malaysia, where the population also has no known males. There are around 40 of these rhinos left in the wild, according to the International Rhino Foundation.  

Both Sumatran rhinos and northern white rhinos have been driven to the brink of extinction by hunters who kill the animals for their valuable horns. 

However, the researchers warn that even if more northern white rhinos are created in the future, the species will remain at risk because there will not be enough genetic variation to create a self-sustaining population. 

Conservators at National Museums Scotland have reconstructed a 1,800-year-old segment of Roman armor that was broken into more than 100 pieces. The completed work will be part of an upcoming exhibition.

For several weeks, museum conservators painstakingly pieced together what they're calling an "ancient jigsaw puzzle." The second-century brass armor was shattered into dozens of pieces and discovered in 1906 scattered throughout Trimontium, a former Roman fort site located southeast of Edinburgh, according to a statement from National Museums Scotland.

The fragments have been in the museum's collection ever since, with the upper portion on display for the past 25 years. (The lower portion had been on loan with the Trimontium Museum.) 

"This is an incredibly rare object, and it's great that this exhibition gave us the opportunity to rebuild it," Fraser Hunter, principal curator of prehistoric and Roman archaeology at National Museums Scotland, said in the statement. "The transformation is striking."

Related: Roman dodecahedron uncovered by amateur archaeologists in the UK

Researchers initially thought the artifact was part of a thigh guard used by a cavalryman. However, as conservators worked out the arduous puzzle, they realized it was actually an armguard inspired by similar equipment worn by gladiators. The piece would have stretched from the shoulder to the hand and protected the wearer in battle.

"The flexible arm guard is an iconic piece of equipment for Roman gladiators, so it is unusual to see it as a sword-arm protection for Roman soldiers too," Richard Abdy, curator of Roman and Iron Age coins at the British Museum, said in the statement.

The artifact will be on display Feb. 1 through June 23 as part of an upcoming exhibition at the British Museum titled "Legion: Life in the Roman Army."

"Now that it's been reconstructed, you can picture the legionary who once wore it," Hunter said. "It was both protection and status symbol — brass was expensive and would have gleamed like gold on his sword arm. It offers a vivid connection to this important period when Scotland sat on the Roman Empire's northern frontier."

Rare footage has captured the slow nighttime courtship ritual of pangolins — which ultimately led to the birth of a "pangopup" filmed clinging to its mother's back.

For the new PBS series "Big Little Journeys," videographers followed a pair of Taiwanese pangolins (Manis pentadactyla pentadactyla) in a forest in Taiwan. In the clip, the female leads the male for hours through the night until she is ready to start mating. The pair are then seen entwined as they attempt to find a position that works around their armor — overlapping scales that are so tough predators struggle to bite into it.

"Pangolins are highly sensitive to sound and smell and so we had to be extremely patient and quiet when filming them in the wild," series producer Paul Williams told Live Science in an email. "Any sudden movement and a pangolin will take a defensive position and curl into a ball. They can stay that way for several hours relying solely on their scales for protection — it's one reason why they are so vulnerable to poachers."

There are eight species of Pangolin found across two continents — Africa and Asia. Three of these, the Sunda pangolin (Manis javnica) and Philippine pangolin (Mains culionensis) and the Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), are listed as critically endangered on the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. The Taiwanese pangolin is a subspecies of the Chinese pangolin. 

Related: Humans now kill 80 million sharks per year, 25 million of which are threatened species

Pangolins are among the world's most trafficked mammals. According to the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF), an estimated 195,000 are killed every year for their scales, which are used in traditional medicine. In 2020, China upgraded the Chinese pangolin's protection status, putting it on the same protection level as the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca).

Taiwan is one of the few places where pangolin poaching is no longer a threat, thanks to strong legislation and protections. This provided the filmmakers with an "unprecedented opportunity" to film the pangolin pair over long periods, Williams said. 

The team spent hundreds of hours waiting and watching as the pangolins woke up and ventured from their burrows as dusk set in. They worked with Nick Ching-Min Sun, a zoologist at the National Pingtung University in Taiwan, who rescues and releases pangolins and uses GPS tags to monitor them. They used a network of camera traps to finally capture the pangolin courtship. 

Seven months later, the female was filmed appearing from a burrow with her new pangopup clinging to the back of her long, scaly tail. "We were able to reveal new insights into Pangolin behavior including courtship, and interactions with their offspring," Williams said. 

Name: Clouded leopard, also known as the mainland clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa)

Where it lives: Southeast Asia

What it eats: Mammals, including ungulates, primates and rodents

Why it's awesome: Unlike lions and cheetahs in Africa, which stalk or race across the open plains in pursuit of prey, clouded leopards have a more arboreal approach to life, having adapted to living in the tropical forests of southeast Asia.

This tree-dwelling lifestyle has pushed them to possess remarkable ankles, which they can rotate by nearly 180 degrees. 

Such incredible flexibility in these joints enables them to descend tree trunks headfirst. In captivity, these cats have been observed climbing upside down along horizontal branches and hanging down by their hind feet, enabling them to jump down onto prey below — although scientists believe they mainly hunt on the ground.

Clouded leopards have short, stocky legs, small bodies — between 27 and 42.5 inches (69 to 108 centimeters) long — and long tails, which are the longest of all cats relative to body size, and help them to balance in trees. They can weigh between 25 and 50 pounds (11 to 23 kilograms). 

Clouded leopards also have the largest upper canines of all living cats, in proportion to their body size. A study published Oct. 6 in the journal Science Advances noted their teeth proportions are similar to some extinct sabertooth species.

Related: Cats' dazzling eye colors may come from 1 unusual ancestor

When taking down large prey, these big cats don't kill with a bite to the throat, unlike their large feline cousins. Instead, they bite the back of the neck to kill their prey, severing the spinal cord. 

In 2006, researchers discovered that clouded leopards are actually two distinct species, with the now-named Sunda clouded leopards (N. diardi) endemic to the Sumatran and Bornean islands. 

Both N. diardi and N. nebulosa are considered vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.  

"The mainland clouded leopard lives in the dense forests across South and Southeast Asia showcasing remarkable adaptations for life in the tree tops," Wai-Ming Wong, director of small cat conservation science for Panthera, the global wild cat conservation organization, told Live Science in an email. 

"However, deforestation and agricultural expansion threatens much of the available habitat across their range. It is crucial to develop effective conservation management plans that include a range of stakeholders from local communities to government agencies to safeguard the future of this charismatic species," Wong added.

The first ever images of the Vangunu giant rat, an elusive rodent that can grow up to 1.5 feet long and is known from only a single specimen that fell out of a tree six years ago, have been recorded by researchers in the Solomon Islands.

Using camera traps and a particularly tasty lure, the team snapped pictures of four rodents at least twice the size of common rats scurrying around the forest floor on the Solomon Islands, an archipelago northeast of Australia in the Pacific Ocean. 

The rodents were "irrefutably identified" as Vangunu giant rats (Uromys vika) owing to their large size, long tails and very short ears, according to a study published Nov. 20 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

"Capturing images of the Vangunu giant rat for the first time is extremely positive news for this poorly known species," study lead author Tyrone Lavery, a lecturer of native vertebrate biology at the University of Melbourne in Australia, said in a statement.

Indigenous people living on Vangunu, an island that sits in the center of Solomon Islands, have long known that rats so big they can chew through coconuts live in their forest — but the species had eluded scientists. The first tangible proof of its existence came in 2017, when commercial loggers felled a tree on Vangunu and a giant rat dropped out of it dead.

Related: Can rats 'imagine'? Rodents show signs of imagination while playing VR games

A few years later, locals from the Zaira community, who manage the largest remaining tract of Vangunu's pristine forest and hold intimate knowledge of its ecology, helped the same researchers set up their camera traps to finally document the secretive rodents in their habitat.

"All images were captured during nocturnal hours, and activity was clustered around midnight," the researchers wrote in the study. They lured the giant rats with sesame oil, which may have been key to their success, they added, as previous attempts using peanut butter only attracted non-native black rats (Rattus rattus).

The pictures come "at a critical juncture," Lavery said. Vungunu giant rats could soon go extinct due to commercial logging, which has decimated much of the island's forest — including the area where the first giant rat specimen was found in 2017, according to the study.

Last year, the Solomon Islands' government granted consent for commercial logging of the last scraps of forest where the already critically endangered rats live. "Logging consent has been granted at Zaira, and if it proceeds it will undoubtedly lead to extinction of the Vangunu giant rat," Lavery said.

Zaira community representatives have lodged an appeal against the decision.

"We hope that these images of U. vika will support efforts to prevent the extinction of this threatened species," Lavery said. 

A stunning photograph has captured a wolf spider wearing a hat of her own babies in Maryland. The image, titled "Wolf Spider Mama" was named the winner of the insects and arachnids category of The Nature Conservancy's 2023 Global Photo Contest.

The image, taken by photographer Benjamin Salb, shows a wolf spider (of the family Lycosidae)  carrying its spiderlings. Salb spotted the spider in the middle of an asphalt path early in the morning.  

"What’s special to me about this recognition is that this mama spider and her spiderlings were just [in] my neighborhood park," he wrote in an Instagram post after the winners were announced. "I wasn’t on a safari nor in the jungles of Madagascar (not hating, I’m just jealous). I was in suburbia."

Related: Horrifying photo captures moment parasitic fungus bursts from huge spider's body

Wolf spiders are unique in that they carry their egg sac on the bottom rear of their abdomens. They can lay around 100 eggs at a time and are fiercely protective of their young. "After hatching, the spiderlings climb on their mother's back, and she carries them around for several days," Jo-Anne Nina Sewlal, an arachnologist at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, previously told Live Science. Within a week, the spiderlings become independent and they climb off and leave.

The overall winner of the contest was Tibor Litauszki from Hungary, who captured the moment a newt feasted on newly laid frog eggs underwater. 

In total, more than 80,000 photographers submitted nearly 189,000 photos to the contest. "Photographers from all walks of life helped give voice to nature by showing us what mattered to them," Alex Snyder, judging coordinator for the competition, said in a statement.

Winner: Jialing Cai, Philippines

A beautiful image of a paper nautilus captured in the aftermath of a volcanic eruption has won the 2023 Ocean Photographer of the Year award. The image, by 25-year-old photographer Jialing Cai, was taken during a blackwater dive in the Philippines. 

The paper nautilus, the species of which is unknown, was floating on a piece of debris in the ocean after the Taal Volcano erupted. "The water column filled with particles from stirred-up sediment," Cai said in a statement. 

"Navigating through the low visibility and dense fog during a blackwater dive, I found this female paper nautilus taking a ride on a drifting wooden stick. When I pressed the shutter, the particles reflected my light. The scene felt unusually serene following the natural disaster and reminds me of a fairy tale set in a snowy night."

The competition winners were announced on Sept. 14. 

Second place: Andrei Savin, Philippines

Andrei Savin's second place work showcases a crab within the medusa of a sea anemone.

Third place: Alvaro Herrero López-Beltrán, Mexico

A whale tries to swim for the water's surface, but it is held back due to entanglement on a stake and fishing line in this haunting third-place piece by Alvaro Herrero López-Beltrán of Mexico.

The Ocean photographer of the year competition is produced by Oceanographic Magazine, in partnership with Blancpain, Arksen and Tourism Western Australia.

In 1994, hikers discovered a group of strange trees growing in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, about 60 miles (100 kilometers) west of Sydney, Australia. One hiker notified a park service naturalist, who then showed leaf specimens to a botanist. It was ultimately determined they represented an ancient species that had been essentially frozen in time since dinosaurs roamed Earth. 

Called a "living fossil" by some, the Wollemi pine (Wollemia nobilis) is nearly identical to preserved remains dating to the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago). There are now just 60 of these trees in the wild — and these tenacious survivors are threatened by bushfires in the region. It was thought to have gone extinct around 2 million years ago. 

Now, scientists from Australia, the United States and Italy have decoded its genome, shedding light on its unique evolution and reproductive habits, as well as aiding conservation efforts. The paper was posted to the preprint database bioRxiv on Aug. 24 and has not been peer reviewed. 

Related: World's deepest canyon is home to Asia's tallest tree - and Chinese scientists only just found it

The pine has 26 chromosomes — containing a staggering 12.2 billion base pairs. In comparison, humans have only around 3 billion base pairs. Despite the size of their genome, Wollemi pines are extremely low in genetic diversity, suggesting a bottleneck (when the population is reduced dramatically) some 10,000 to 26,000 years ago. 

Indeed, the plants do not exchange much genetic material. The remaining trees appear to reproduce mostly by cloning themselves through coppicing — in which suckers emerge from the base and become new trees.

Their rarity may be partly due to the high number of transposons, or "jumping genes" — stretches of DNA that can change their position within the genome. These elements also account for the genome's size. "The tiniest plant genome and the largest plant genome have almost the same number of genes. Large differences in size usually come from transposons," Gerald Schoenknecht, program director for the National Science Foundation’s Plant Genome Research Program told Live Science. Schoenknecht was not involved with the research, but the NSF did provide funding.

As transposons leap to new locations, they can change the sequence of "letters" in a DNA molecule, thus causing or reversing mutations in genes. They may carry functional DNA with them or alter DNA at the site of insertion, and thus have a substantial impact on the evolution of an organism. 

If the transposons induced harmful mutations, they may have contributed to population decline precipitated by a changing climate and other factors, the researchers said. These stressful conditions may have led the plant to switch to clonal reproduction. Because increases in transposons correlate to sexual reproduction, a change to asexual reproduction may have reduced their potential introduction of damaging mutations. Paradoxically, while the trees were still reliant on sexual reproduction, the transposons may have played a role in increasing genetic diversity and thus at least temporarily made them more resilient to  changing conditions. 

"In 99% of all cases, mutations are probably not a good idea," Schoenknecht said. "But over millions of years, the 1% that helps can move the species forward. In this case it may have been a bit of an advantage."

Decoding the genome has also revealed why the Wollemi pine appears to be susceptible to disease — in particular, Phytophthora cinnamomi, a pathogenic water mold that causes dieback. The tree's disease resistant genes are suppressed by a type of its own RNA that is associated with the development of wider leaves. Wollemi pines, unlike most conifers, have wide needles. 

So, the evolution of wider leaves may have led to the suppression of disease resistance and opened the species up to pathogenic threats — which may have been inadvertently tracked in by hikers who illegally visited the protected spot. P. cinnamomi is common in cultivated plants.

While only four small populations remain in the wild, the pines have been extensively propagated by botanic gardens and other institutions in an effort to conserve them and study their unique biology. The species is considered critically endangered by the IUCN. 

Thus, the analysis of the Wollemi pine's genome is not simply an academic curiosity — it has serious implications for the species' survival. 

Incredible footage showing guard dogs stopping a puma from hunting sheep in the pitch black Patagonian mountains has been captured using heat sensitive cameras and drones. It is the first time this behavior has ever been filmed. 

The clip was filmed as part of "Animals Up Close With Bertie Gregory," a new National Geographic series that takes viewers to remote locations around the world looking at creatures up close in their daily lives. In the episode "Patagonia Puma," Gregory — a National Geographic Explorer — and his team visit a remote, mountainous region of Patagonia in southern Chile. Their aim was to capture the lives of pumas (Puma concolor) and the challenges they face — including their coexistence with farmers, who have historically killed pumas that hunt their livestock. 

In the footage, filmed on a sheep farm in the middle of the night, Gregory and cameraman Sam Stewart use thermal imaging cameras and a drone to see into the darkness. At the top of a ridge, they spot a puma creeping down the mountainside directly at the sheep. "They have absolutely no idea that it's there," Stewart said while filming the scene. 

Related: Watch bear and wolf attack moose mom and calf at same time in rare, remarkable footage

The puma hops the farm's fence with ease and is in with the sheep, ready for the kill, but the dogs sense something and start barking. The puma steps away and jumps back over the fence before retreating up the hill.

Hunting pumas has been illegal in Chile since the early 1980s, but it is still sometimes practiced in private land. Conservation projects now work with farmers to use non-lethal means of protecting sheep, including fences, tracking collars and specialized guard dogs, such as Maremma and Great Pyrenees Sheepdogs — powerful breeds with long, thick coats suitable for living in the freezing Patagonian landscape.

The Nat Geo footage shows the dogs in action. 

"If the farmer's solution is to shoot the pumas, that's not actually a good solution," Gregory told Live Science. "If you shoot one of those pumas their territory very quickly gets occupied by another puma from a neighboring piece of territory, so the problem continues. Not only are you killing pumas… you're also not solving the problem." 

Gregory said he met a different farmer who used to shoot pumas but realized it wasn't helping protect his flock. "He told me about this one farm where they used to kill 100 pumas per year… after the dogs were introduced to protect the flock from the pumas, the farmer lost just two sheep."  The farmer now breeds a special type of sheep dog that protects sheep from predators, and gives them to other farms. Gregory's footage is the first time this dog deterrent has been filmed working.

"I couldn't find anywhere where anyone had actually seen or filmed the interaction between the dogs and the pumas” said Gregory. "We filmed that interaction between the pumas [and] the dogs for the first time."

"Animals Up Close With Bertie Gregory" is available to stream on Disney+ from Sept. 13. 

Nature is a complex web that humans have barely begun to untangle. And sometimes, when we try, we just wind up making an even bigger tangle. 

From causing roofs to collapse to instigating emu wars, here are 10 times humans messed with nature and it backfired.

1. Operation Cat Drop

In response to a malaria outbreak in Borneo in the early 1950s, the World Health Organization (WHO) sprayed the island with a powerful insecticide called DDT. This successfully killed off the mosquitoes that carried the disease, but it also triggered a cascade of catastrophic, unforeseen events.

DDT is an indiscriminate poison that, it turned out, also exterminated parasitic wasps that preyed on thatch-eating caterpillars. Without the wasps to keep them at bay, the caterpillars multiplied and gnawed at people's roofs, eventually causing the structures to suddenly collapse. 

Then, the islanders' cats started dying. The insecticide had moved up the food chain, with geckoes eating the poisoned insects and cats feasting on the geckoes. As the cats died out, the number of rats skyrocketed. The rodents spread disease across the island, sparking outbreaks of typhus and plague. 

In 1960, the WHO finally launched Operation Cat Drop to stem the wave of problems it had created, which involved parachuting cats into Borneo. While some reports say 14,000 cats were airdropped in the successful operation, others put this number at 23. 

2. The Emu War

When Australian veterans returned from fighting in World War I, the government gifted them land in Western Australia for farming. These holdings started out small, but as the Great Depression gripped the country in 1929, the new owners were encouraged to expand wheat production.

In October 1932, farmers who were already in trouble due to falling wheat prices encountered another threat to their livelihoods. Mobs of emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae) — large flightless birds that look similar to ostriches and are indigenous to the outback — suddenly appeared, trampling and chowing down on their crops. Emus migrate southwest after their breeding season in May and June, and the wheat fields likely provided safe habitat, plentiful food and a reliable source of water.

By November, the damage was so severe the minister of defense sent soldiers to wage war against the emus. On the first day of the Emu War, as it became officially known, the army faced a 50-strong flock with a barrage of machine-gun fire that turned out to be largely ineffective. The birds scattered and ran, dodging the bullets. Six days later, with just a dozen feathered casualties, the war was deemed a lost cause, and the soldiers traipsed home. Major Meredith, who led the troops, was quoted in a 1953 newspaper article, saying the emus "can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks." 

3. Chasing rat tails

When rats began infesting houses and spreading the plague in 1902, French colonialists in Hanoi decided it was time to tackle the city's rodent problem. They sent the inhabitants of what is now the capital of Vietnam into the sewers to hunt the rats down, which yielded significant results — at first.

To spur the eradication effort and encourage entrepreneurialism, French officials created a bounty for each rat killed of 1 piastre (the currency used in French Indochina between 1887 and 1952). People could collect the reward in exchange for every rat tail handed over as proof of elimination. But as the death toll rose to tens of thousands of rats a day, officials noticed a strange increase in tailless rats scurrying around the city.

Despite the growing mounds of tails, there also seemed to be no decline in the number of living rats. Officials realized that people were releasing amputated rats so they could reproduce, expanding the opportunity to make a profit. Health officials also discovered farming operations dedicated to breeding rats in the city's outskirts. The French later scrapped the bounty. Left unchecked, rats carrying the bubonic plague caused an outbreak in 1906, resulting in 263 deaths. 

4. Indestructible starfish

The Indo-Pacific is home to threatened coral reef ecosystems, and one of their natural predators can decimate entire reefs in a matter of months. Crown-of-thorns starfish (Acanthaster planci) can reach 31 inches (80 centimeters) in diameter and sport up to 21 arms covered in hundreds of toxic thorns. They satisfy their voracious appetite by inverting their stomach so it hangs out of their mouth, and sucking the tissue off coral skeletons.

Related: Humans are practically defenseless. Why don't wild animals attack us more? 

In some places, people attempted to kill the starfish by chopping them into pieces — forgetting that starfish can regenerate body parts, and so inadvertently multiplied their numbers. People also injected the animals with poisonous chemicals and accidentally caused them to spawn, releasing thousands of sperm and eggs into the water. A more efficient method is to remove the starfish from the reef, according to Oceana.

5. A 100-year-old miscalculation

The Colorado River is a critical source of water for more than 40 million people in seven U.S. states. However, it has shrunk dramatically in the last few decades, in part because of climate change and in part due to a 100-year-old miscalculation. 

In 1922, Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming divided the Colorado River's water supply among themselves. But their estimate of the river's yearly flow was derived from an unusually wet period of time and was never adjusted, meaning the states had assigned themselves higher amounts of water than the river could provide in normal times. Over the course of a century, this political oversight has led to a 20% decline in the flow of the Colorado River and record-low water levels in the Hoover Dam reservoir and Lake Powell — the two largest reservoirs in the country. 

6. Cane toad bonanza

Toward the end of the 19th century, Australia's budding sugarcane industry encountered a bump in the road. Native beetles had acquired a taste for the crops that were introduced a century earlier and were causing huge losses by chomping on the roots.

Entomologists heard about the American toad's (Rhinella marina, formerly Bufo marinus) apparent success in curbing cane beetle populations in Puerto Rico. In 1935, after importing a breeding population from Hawaii, scientists let 2,400 toads loose in the Gordonvale area of Queensland. But they had failed to check whether the toads actually eat cane beetles and, according to the National Museum of Australia, did not assess the potential environmental impacts.

Cane beetle populations held steady, and the bugs continued to ravage sugarcane plantations. Meanwhile, the cane toad population exploded and the amphibians spread from Queensland to coastal New South Wales, the Northern Territory and parts of northwestern Australia. Cane toads secrete venom that can kill animals that eat them, which soon triggered declines in native predators — including northern quolls (Dasyurus hallucatus), now listed as endangered — and caused huge damage to ecosystems.

The invasive toads still wreak havoc today, but "there is unlikely to ever be a broadscale method available to control cane toads across Australia," the Australian government said on its website. 

7. Underground inferno

In May 1962, a fire started in the small borough of Centralia, Pennsylvania, which reportedly originated as an intentional burning of residential trash in an abandoned mine. As the flames spread, people tried to douse them with water several times over the next few days, but no amount of effort seemed to extinguish the fire. The waste continued burning into August, when the council alerted local coal companies and state mine inspectors of the possibility of a mine fire.

Centralia sits atop a labyrinth of abandoned coal mines, which may have been set ablaze by an unsealed opening in the trash pit. The fires are still burning today. Federal and state governments gave up fighting the flames in the 1980s, opting to relocate inhabitants instead. The smoldering coal seams have baked the town through the ground, bleaching trees white and opening fissures that leak poisonous gases. Little remains of Centralia except a deserted grid of streets and a dozen people who refused to leave. It could be another 250 years before the coal fueling the underground inferno runs out.

8. Electrocuting fish

Asian carp were imported to the U.S. in the 1970s to deal with algal blooms in water treatment plants and aquaculture ponds. But they soon escaped confinement and made their way into rivers and streams — some species can even jump over low dams and overcome barriers in waterways. Having escaped, they became invasive and interfered with fishing activities. 

Carp have spread to the Mississippi River and its tributaries and are on the verge of spilling into the Great Lakes, where they could wreak ecological havoc and tank the annual $7 billion fishing industry. As a preventive measure, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers erected an underwater electric barrier in Chicago's waterway system in 2013. The design stuns fish as they swim upstream, and their limp bodies drift back down. While it seems to have kept carp at bay so far, the barrier may not be completely reliable and could let small fish sneak through. 

9. Smash sparrows

Under the rule of leader Mao Zedong from 1949 to 1976, China underwent an industrial makeover like no other. The slogan "man must conquer nature" became a rallying cry during the Great Leap Forward — a radical social and economic project designed to outproduce Britain and achieve Mao's idea of communism.

Mao launched the "Four Pests" campaign in 1958 and called upon people to eradicate flies, mosquitoes, rats and sparrows. He was convinced sparrows were diminishing crop yields by eating the grain and ordered them to be shot, their nests destroyed and any survivors eliminated by banging pots and pans until they died of exhaustion. 

As sparrow numbers dwindled across China, the birds' prey swarmed in. Locusts boomed and crop-eating insects surged. Combined with other effects of Mao's war on nature — including widespread deforestation and pesticide use — and other disastrous policies, the "Smash Sparrow" effort contributed to a devastating famine that killed tens of millions of people.

10. Flushed away

For 7,000 years, the Mississippi River has carried sediment from across North America and deposited it in the Gulf of Mexico. There, the mud piled up into lobes of land separated by swampy water channels, shaping the famous river delta and its marshes. But in 1718, French colonists who founded New Orleans on a finger of land alongside the Mississippi's main channel were dismayed when spring floods sent water streaming through the half-finished buildings. They ordered the construction of a levee — a mound of earth acting as a barrier to keep the city dry. Over the decades, more and more levees were erected until they merged into a wall stretching thousands of miles north into Missouri.

These constructions enabled cities and farmland to flourish, but they also funneled the river into a single torrent. While the Mississippi formerly recycled the soils it flushed away by creating marshland, it now shoots straight out into the gulf and dumps them in the deep sea. As a result, since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost over 2,000 square miles (5,200 square kilometers) of land to the ocean — an area equivalent to a football field drowning every 100 minutes.

The loss of protective wetlands worsens the impact of storms and hurricanes on coastal communities. Compounded by rising sea levels, land loss also threatens Louisiana's commercial fishing industry — which makes up 30% of the U.S. yearly catch — five major ports and rich wetland ecosystems. 

One of the world's most endangered animals, an African wild ass — which looks like a donkey with zebra legs — has been born at a zoo in the U.K., raising hopes for its species' continued survival.

African wild asses (Equus africanus) are a species of donkey native to Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. The wild donkeys have light gray coats, with a single black stripe along their spines and horizontal stripes on their legs, similar to the markings on a zebra. 

African wild asses are listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species. Experts believe there are fewer than 200 individuals left in the wild.

The new, unnamed male, or jack, was born Aug. 20 at Marwell Zoo in Hampshire, England. The foal, which zookeepers describe as having "gangly legs" and "floppy ears," currently shares an enclosure with its mother Nadifa, according to a statement from the zoo. As with most other equine species, the foal was up on its feet shortly after being born and took no time at all to get up to full speed. 

Related: 'World's rarest' giraffe born without spots at Tennessee zoo

"The foal has already been seen doing 'zoomies' around the paddock and is looking nice and healthy," Darren Ives, a senior animal keeper at Marwell Zoo, said in the statement. The neighboring Addax (Addax nasomaculatus), a critically endangered species of antelope, seemed to take a particular interest in the energetic foal and spent lots of time watching him run around from their enclosure through their adjoining fence, Ives said. 

The foal's father, Lars, has been temporarily moved from the enclosure to allow the foal and Nadifa to bond. In the wild, the relationship between a foal and its mother is extremely important to the offspring's chances of survival and well-being. As a result, the keepers are keen to encourage a similar bond between the two in captivity. 

In the wild, African wild asses live in groups, or coffles, of five or fewer individuals. 

The foal is Nadifa's third offspring, while Lars became a father for the fifth time. Nadifa was born at Marwell Zoo in 2007 to parents who had been at the zoo since 1993. The asses' keepers are "very proud" of their multi-generational breeding program, which has become increasingly important as wild populations decline due to historic hunting and competition for resources with livestock. 

Researchers and conservationists have set off on a two-year voyage to retrace Charles Darwin's famous journey across the globe. The expedition comes more than 190 years after the naturalist sailed the world collecting specimens and shaping ideas that would help him formulate his theory of evolution. 

The expedition, named Darwin200, began on Aug. 15 when an international team set off from Plymouth, England, on board the Dutch tall ship Oosterschelde. The team will sail more than 46,000 miles (74,000 kilometers) and drop anchor in 32 different ports across four continents, before ending their journey in Falmouth, U.K. Along the way, they will collect scientific data, train future environmentalists and promote conservation.

The expedition's route will closely follow Darwin's original voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, which set off from Plymouth on Dec. 27, 1831 and returned to Falmouth on Oct. 2, 1836. Darwin was 22 years old when he joined the expedition with the intention of seeing the world before joining the church. But during the trip, Darwin became fascinated by the wide range of different species he encountered, which eventually led to him formulating his theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin's account of the journey, which was published after his return, also helped him establish his reputation as one of Victorian Britain's academic elite. 

Related: Charles Darwin's stolen 'tree of life' notebooks returned after 20 years 

The main aim of the new expedition is to train and inspire 200 young environmentalists, between 18 and 25 years old, who will each spend a week on board the Oosterschelde studying threatened species that Darwin encountered on his voyage. 

"We wanted to create a similarly transformative experience [for the young naturalists]," Stewart McPherson, mission director of Darwin200, said in a statement. They have "the potential to be the STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] and conservation leaders of tomorrow," he added.

Every week, the team will broadcast interactive "nature hour" sessions live from the ship for people across the world.

The team will also collect important data on ocean plastics and coral reef health, as well as survey seabirds, whales and dolphins.

The Oosterschelde will make its next stop in Tenerife in the Canary Islands, before heading to Brazil. From there it will cruise around South America before sailing to Australia, New Zealand, Pacific island nations and South Africa, and then finally returning home. 

A pearly white baby humpback whale has been filmed off the coast of Australia, prompting speculation about whether it is an extraordinarily rare albino whale. Others also wondered whether the calf could be the offspring of "Migaloo", a completely white whale like the mythical Moby Dick.

Drone operator Jaydyn Mathewson spied the pale whale in late July, gliding alongside its mother through the turquoise waters off the northern tip of New South Wales. Humpback whales migrate to this stretch of eastern Australia’s coast between June and August to mate and give birth, having traveled north from the rich feeding grounds of Antarctica, where they return between September and November.

Humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) are almost completely dark gray to black and typically feature white blotches only on their bellies, but in the video, the calf's milky-white tail and fins can be seen gleaming in the sunlight.

However, experts are hesitant to attribute the calf's features to albinism. This rare genetic condition is caused by a recessive gene which disrupts the cells’ ability to make melanin, the substance that produces pigmentation in skin, hair, and eyes. This results in pale skin and pinkish eyes.

Related: Whale sighting in Australia hints at 'extremely unusual' interspecies adoption

While rarely documented, lighter hues aren't unheard of in newborn whales, Wally Franklin, a cetacean research and marine scientist at The Oceania Project, a non-profit dedicated to the research and conservation of dolphins and whales, told Live Science. "They are born with a down covering which appears very light and whitish in the light and as a result they are mistakenly considered to be albino," he said. "The initial down covering dissipates usually within a week and the normal black and white pigmentation is established."

Photographers also captured footage of two other baby "Moby Dicks" off the state of New South Wales in recent weeks. One was spied near Burrewarra Point at the southern tip of the state by a drone in late June, almost seeming to glow beneath the waves. The other was spotted in mid-July at Lennox Head in the north, where it was filmed sidling up to its mother until it slipped out of view beneath her protective belly. 

Determining whether these youngsters have albino traits would require observation over time as well as skin samples. But whales confirmed to have albinism are extremely rare. "The reality is that the only albino in the eastern Australian humpback whale population is the very well known 'Migaloo,'" Franklin said. 

Migaloo, whose name means "White Fella" in several Australian Aboriginal languages, was first spotted in 1991 off the country's west coast, which falls along another humpback whale migration route from Antarctica. It took almost 15 years to confirm his albino status from sloughed off skin cells, which showed he has the genetic hallmark of albinism. 

Albinism can increase sensitivity to sunlight and cold and make creatures more vulnerable to predators. Yet Migaloo has survived to adulthood and is a healthy whale. "The observational evidence is that he gets along with other humpbacks in a very normal way," Franklin said.

Migaloo hasn't been spotted since 2020, though the sighting of a pale adult humpback off Australia's Queensland coast earlier this year raised hopes that it could be him. Even so, for the white calves to be his, Migaloo would need to have mated with a female who also carried the rare mutation for albinism.

What's more likely, Franklin said, is that the sightings are the result of a rare good news environmental story: conservation has led to the resurgence of the Australian humpback population in the last 60 years, from a few hundred in the 1960s to tens of thousands today. This means there’s an uptick in the number of young being born in the calving waters off of eastern Australia. 

"Hence there are increased sightings of newborns occurring along the coast," Franklin said. "With so much interest in the humpback migration, we are both sighting and receiving increased coverage of these beautiful light colored new born calves, which is wonderful."

A cypress tree in China  is the tallest tree ever discovered in Asia. It is also believed to be the second-tallest tree in the world, standing at an astonishing 335 feet (102 meters) tall. At this height, the tree would tower over the Statue of Liberty, which stands at 305 feet (93 m).

The gigantic cypress was discovered in May by a Peking University research team at the Yarlung Zangbo Grand Canyon nature reserve in Bome County, Nyingchi City, in the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, according to a statement released by the university.

The species the cypress belongs to is unclear, although Chinese state media publications suggested it is either a Himalayan cypress (Cupressus torulosa) or a Tibetan cypress (Cupressus gigantea).

The tree is 9.6 feet (2.9 m) in diameter, according to the state-run Chinese publication the People's Daily Online.

Before this discovery, Asia's tallest tree was a 331-foot-tall (101 m) yellow meranti (Shorea faguetiana) located in the Danum Valley Conservation Area in Sabah, Malaysia.

The Tibet Autonomous Region has a unique ecosystem that is increasingly influenced by development and global climate change. However, the area — and in particular Nyingchi City — has recently been the focus of conservation efforts to protect flora and fauna. The Peking University researchers have documented tall trees in the region to better understand the area's environmental diversity and to help ecological protection efforts, the statement said. 

In May last year, the  team found a 272-foot-tall (83 m) fir tree in southwest China, which they initially believed was the largest tree in China. The team also uncovered a 252-foot (77 m) tree in Medog County a month earlier.

Related: The oldest tree in the world (and the 7 runner-ups)

Continuing their survey this year, the researchers used drones, lasers and radar equipment to map out the trees in the area and identify their heights from the ground.

After days of field surveys, the cypress was found and confirmed as the tallest tree in Asia. Using drones, a 3D laser scanner and lidar technology — which uses light beams to provide distance measurements — the team created a 3D model of the enormous tree, providing accurate dimensions. Using this, they confirmed it was the tallest tree in Asia. 

Guo Qinghua, a professor at the Institute of Remote Sensing of Peking University, told state newspaper the Global Times that the tree is interesting because its supporting roots are not completely buried underground. The tree also has a complex branching system that provides "ideal microclimates and habitats for some endangered plants and animals," a university statement said. 

Currently, the tallest tree in the world is an 381-foot (116 m) coastal redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) in the Redwood National Park in California. The tree, estimated to be between 600 and 800 years old and nicknamed Hyperion after one of the Titans in Greek mythology, was discovered in 2006.

Last year, the U.S. Park Service decided to limit public access to Hyperion after visitors were found climbing the tree and left waste in the area, which damaged the surrounding undergrowth.

A scientist who spent a record-breaking 100 consecutive days living in a seafloor habitat has just resurfaced. Last month, while he was still underwater, Live Science got the chance to chat with him about this unique experience and the initial scientific findings of his mission.

Joseph Dituri, a 55-year-old biomedical engineer with the International Board of Undersea Medicine and a former U.S. Navy saturation diver, lived inside the Jules' Undersea Lodge off the coast of Florida for 100 days between March 1 and June 9. The mission, known as Project Neptune, was a scientific endeavor to study the effects of living in a high-pressure environment for a sustained period.

Dituri, who goes by the nickname "Dr. Deep Sea," eclipsed the record for the longest stay in an underwater fixed habitat, beating past record holders, Bruce Cantrell and Jessica Fain, scientists who spent 73 days living in the Jules' Undersea Lodge in 2014, according to Guinness World Records.

On May 19 (Day 80 of the mission), Dituri spoke with Live Science from the Jules' Undersea Lodge to explain what it was like to live underwater in a confined space and how his body and brain had changed over time. 

Related: What are the deepest spots in Earth's oceans?

Living underwater 

The Jules' Undersea Lodge sits 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface of the green-tinged Emerald Lagoon in the coastal waters off Key Largo. The habitat has a surface area of around 100 square feet (9 square meters) and is pressurized to around 1.7 atmospheres. "It's basically like a really small RV," Dituri told Live Science. 

Dituri's days underwater were jam-packed. He conducted medical tests on himself, taught students in his class at the University of South Florida, did press interviews, shared videos on Instagram, worked out with resistance bands, spoke to schoolchildren and went scuba diving in the lagoon via the habitat's moon pool — the only way in and out of the lodge.

"I have almost no downtime," Dituri said. "But it's a really good thing to stay busy when you're trapped in a small space." 

Dituri learned to stop keeping track of how far along he was to avoid getting fixated on the amount of time remaining. "I've stopped counting the days," Dituri said. "You've just got to set your mind to it and do it."

Around 50 other individuals — including family members, doctors, scientists and schoolchildren — visited during his stay, which helped alleviate the mental challenges of prolonged confinement and solitude. Being virtually connected to the outside world has also helped, Dituri said. "But it's not the same as seeing people in person."

Dituri's career in the U.S. Navy helped him overcome the psychological challenges of living underwater, but some aspects of the experience still shocked him.

"One of the things that has surprised me the most is how much I miss the sun," Dituri said. "I want to go out and take a peek." But what Dituri actually missed most during the mission was skydiving, he said.

Collecting data 

A research team of doctors and scientists continually monitored changes to Dituri's  physiology by analyzing samples of his blood, urine and saliva. They also carried out a variety of tests, including electrocardiograms (EKGs) to test his heart function, electroencephalograms (EEGs) to test his brain activity, pulmonary function tests to see how well his lungs were working, pupillometry tests to monitor the pressure in his skull, and regular blood pressure tests. Researchers also monitored his sleep using advanced wrist-based sensors, and he underwent various psychological evaluations regularly.

Dituri shared some of the initial results from these tests with Live Science. He said that during the 80 days he had already been underwater, his oxidative stress — damage to cells caused by reactive byproducts of oxygen breakdown, which is known to play a role in aging — had decreased by two-thirds and that "all the inflammatory markers in his body" had been cut in half. He also noted an increase in his stem cell count and the length of his telomeres, the protective ends of chromosomes that naturally shorten throughout a person's lifetime. His cholesterol levels also dropped. 

However, a "total shocker" was that the percentage of his sleep made up by REM sleep, or the stage of sleep where most dreaming occurs, increased from between 35% to 40% up to more than 60%. People who stayed overnight in the habitat showed smaller increases in REM sleep, he added.

In a more recent interview with the Daily Mail on Day 93 of his mission, Dituri claimed that because of the accumulation of all of these factors, he now feels "10 years younger."

Dituri also exercised with a new type of resistance band designed to help astronauts maintain muscle mass in space, though the research team hasn't disclosed the results yet.

None of these findings have been peer-reviewed or replicated yet, which are key elements of the scientific method, Dituri said. As such, more research is needed to make concrete conclusions.

Dituri hopes his sojourn underwater helps spread a message of ocean conservation. At least 3,000 children learned about the mission, either via video calls or in person, which is "unheard of" in such a short time, he added. This has allowed him to teach the "next generation" why the ocean is so important.

Freshwater mugger crocodiles and gharials are turning orange in Nepal, and scientists think it's down to iron in the waters where they hang out.

The orange crocs were spotted in Chitwan National Park, a protected area of the Himalayan foothills. "Have these crocs been drinking too much Sunny D? Messily eating Cheetos? Or could they be taking fashion advice from Donald Trump?" Phoebe Griffith, a postdoctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute of Freshwater Ecology and Inland Fisheries, wrote in a Twitter thread on May 29. 

To find out why the crocs have become tangerine-colored, researchers collaborated with Project Mecistops — a conservation project working to preserve and reintroduce critically endangered West African slender-snouted crocodiles (Mecistops cataphractus) in Côte d'Ivoire and throughout western Africa. 

It turns out some of the rivers and streams in the park have extremely high levels of iron, which could explain why some crocodilians are sporting orange coats.

"Gharial and mugger crocodiles who spent lots of time in some streams, or near the mouths of them, were getting a serious fake tan," Griffith explained on Twitter. "Turns out some areas of Chitwan have seriously high levels of iron in the water, and iron reacts with oxygen to form an orange substance called iron oxide."

Related: How are alligators and crocodiles different?

As these crocs spend most of their time in the water — gharials are not well-suited to walking on land and typically only crawl onto sandbanks to bask in the sun or nest — the iron-rich rivers could have coated their scales and teeth in a temporary layer of rusty particles.

Gharials (Gavialis gangeticus) are critically endangered freshwater crocodiles that have a long, narrow snout tipped with a bulbous growth. Males can grow to be around16 feet (5 meters) long and weigh up to 550 pounds (250 kilograms). 

The gharial population in Nepal has plummeted by 98% since the 1940s due to overhunting, according to the Zoological Society of London. Most of the 200 remaining gharials live in Chitwan National Park, where they face additional threats linked to pollution, mining and declining fish populations.

Mugger crocodiles (Crocodylus palustris) are more widespread and inhabit marshes and waterways stretching from southern Iran to the Indian subcontinent. They are broad-snouted and similar in size to gharials, but they can weigh twice as much due to their girth. 

The discolored gharials’ and crocodiles’ new orange look is temporary, and the rusty particles could wash off in less iron-rich waters. "It should go off automatically in clean(er) water," Lala Aswini Kumar Singh, a zoologist and wildlife researcher in India, wrote in a comment on Twitter.

These aren't the first rust-colored reptiles on record. A 2016 study in the African Journal of Ecology reported that orange dwarf crocodiles (Osteolaemus tetraspis) living in caves in Gabon may have turned orange after being exposed to bat guano, which contains high levels of urea — a substance with a bleaching effect that forms when protein is broken down in the liver.

Iron oxide may also have tinted an orange-hued alligator in South Carolina in 2017, after it spent the winter in a rusty iron culvert. 

Adorable marsupials that look like "mini kangaroos on steroids" are bouncing back in southern Australia after disappearing from the region for more than 100 years.

Brush-tailed bettongs (Bettongia penicillata), also known as yalgiri in the language of the local Narungga People, are energetic creatures that once hopped and darted across much of the Australian mainland. Over the last two centuries, their numbers have dwindled due to predation by foxes and feral cats, as well as habitat loss. Now only a few thousand survive in pockets of Western Australia, in sanctuaries and on islands. But recently, the mini marsupials have made a comeback in the south after being reintroduced by conservationists.

"They're like a little, ankle-sized kangaroo — a mini kangaroo on steroids if you like," Derek Sandow, an ecologist with the Northern and Yorke Landscape Board in South Australia, told the French News Agency (AFP). "They've got really powerful hind legs, they carry their young in their pouch, like a kangaroo does, but they're only a kilo and a half (three pounds)."

Sandow is part of a team of wildlife researchers that have tagged and reintroduced 120 brush-tailed bettongs to the Yorke Peninsula, near Adelaide, since August 2021, in the hope that the population might recover. The new arrivals were translocated from nearby Wedge Island and from the Upper Warren region of Western Australia and the latest release was coordinated with Noongar and Narungga Traditional Owners, according to WWF Australia.

"On the southern Yorke peninsula, we've actually got geography on our side," Sandow told ABC Radio Adelaide. "We've got a foot-shaped peninsula, ocean on three sides. We've built a predator management fence across the ankle, just to slow the movement of foxes and cats, but we're operating in a working landscape, so there's towns and farms, and we're trying to demonstrate that with a reduction of these threats, we can actually bring back these really vulnerable native species."

Related: Mammals with pouches are 'more evolved' than humans — sort of 

Recent monitoring shows that the tiny, furry animals are thriving on the peninsula. The researchers trapped 85 brush-tailed bettongs and found that 40% were untagged, meaning they had been born since the reintroduction. Almost all the females they caught had young in their pouches. "We're getting great results," Sandow told ABC Radio Adelaide.

Brush-tailed bettongs may be cute, but they are merciless when it comes to their young. 

A female carrying a baby in its pouch will fling it out if a predator chases after them to divert its attention, sacrificing the joey so she can escape. "It sounds like horrible parenting," Sandow told AFP. Brush-tailed bettongs breed continuously and females can give birth to three young each year that each spend up to 98 days in the pouch. "They can basically have their baby ready to go in their back pocket, and then replace it," Sandow said. 

If their populations can recover, these tiny marsupials could considerably re-shape and enhance the landscape, Sandow said. "A little bettong can move tons of soil per year. So they dig in the ground, they create little micro habitats for water infiltration for seeds to establish." Brush-tailed bettongs never drink water and stay away from green plants too, preferring fungus, bulbs, seeds, insects and resin.

To keep track of brush-tailed bettongs, the researchers have an unexpected trick up their sleeve. "Most native fauna — and the yalgi is no different — are a sucker for peanut butter," Sandow told ABC Radio Adelaide. "When we're actually trying to trap these animals to do health checks or do population sampling, peanut butter is our secret weapon."

The tiny creatures don't discriminate between smooth or crunchy, Sandow added.

Conservationists have released new photos of the only known living albino giant anteater on Earth, who is now believed to be at least 1 year old.

Researchers from the Anteaters and Highways Project (AHP), a multi-year assessment of anteater-vehicle collisions set up by Brazil's Wild Animal Conservation Institute (ICAS), first discovered the anteater in December 2022 on a ranch in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul state. They named the unique animal Alvin.

Alvin was spotted clinging to his typically colored mother's back, a behavior seen in all young giant anteaters (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) below 10 months old. The team captured the snowy juvenile and fitted him with a GPS vest to track his future movements, AHP representatives wrote in a statement supplied to Live Science.

On May 10, AHP posted new images of Alvin on Facebook. The white anteater is now 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) long and weighs 31 pounds (14 kilograms), which suggests he is over 1 year old and not far from being fully grown, AHP representatives wrote on Facebook. Alvin was also given his second GPS vest after outgrowing his first one.

Albinism is a genetic condition that prevents animals from producing melanin, the pigment that gives color to their skin, fur, feathers, scales and eyes. As a result, individuals with albinism appear completely white and have pink eyes. Their eyes and skin are very sensitive to light, which can cause impaired vision and make individuals more susceptible to sunburn. Albinism is a recessive trait, meaning that both parents must carry a copy of the gene.

Related: Zoo anteater exposed people to rabies in first-of-its-kind case 

The main threat to most albino animals is a higher risk of predation because their discoloration often makes them stand out from their environment. And this seems to be the case with giant anteaters.

In August 2021, AHP researchers found the corpse of another juvenile male albino giant anteater, the first of its kind ever discovered, in the same area as Alvin. The body showed signs of predation. 

"When we got there, he was already dead, but we were able to collect genetic samples that were sent to the lab for analysis," Dr. Débora Yogui, a veterinarian with the AHP team, said in the statement. By comparing the DNA collected from the first albino with Alvin's DNA, the team will be able to tell if the animals are related, she added. 

If Alvin and the deceased albino are not directly related, it could suggest that the species gene pool has been decreased by inbreeding, which would explain why this rare condition has started appearing, AHP representatives wrote. 

The researchers suspect that inbreeding is likely due to the destruction of the animals' natural habitat by human deforestation. Giant anteaters are currently listed as Vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List.

The team is also concerned that, even if Alvin survives future predation, he may be impacted by overexposure to sunlight. Anteaters try to spend the hottest hours of the day in the shade because the land-dwelling mammals are poorly suited to dealing with extreme heat. But deforestation has robbed anteaters of this much-needed shade, which poses a particular problem to Alvin because of his sensitive skin.

The AHP researchers will continue to track and monitor Alvin's progress as he gets older. But they also warned that they will not step in to save Alvin if he falls ill or is attacked by predators.

"Even though we know that it runs several risks, we cannot interfere in the life of this animal directly, because we would be influencing natural ecological processes," Nina Attias, a wildlife biologist with ICAS, said in the statement. "As conservationists, we know that this is not good for the species or the environment."

The "completely unique," wolf-like Tasmanian tigers that thrived on the island of Tasmania before they went extinct in 1936 may have survived in the wilderness for far longer than previously thought, research suggests. There is also a small possibility they are still alive today, experts say. 

Tasmanian tigers, also known as thylacines (Thylacinus cynocephalus) were carnivorous marsupials with distinctive stripes on their lower back. The species was originally found across Australia but disappeared from the mainland roughly 3,000 years ago due to human persecution. It persisted on the island of Tasmania until a government bounty introduced by the first European settlers in the 1880s destroyed the population and drove the species to extinction.

"The thylacine was completely unique among living marsupials," said Andrew Pask, a professor of epigenetics at the University of Melbourne in Australia who was not involved in the new research. "Not only did it have its iconic wolf-like appearance, but it was also our only marsupial apex predator. Apex predators form extremely important parts of the food chain and are often responsible for stabilizing ecosystems," Pask told Live Science in an email.

The last known thylacine died in captivity at the Hobart Zoo in Tasmania on Sept. 7, 1936. It is one of the few animal species for which an exact date of extinction is known, according to the Thylacine Integrated Genomic Restoration Research (TIGRR) Lab, which is led by Pask and aims to bring Tasmanian tigers back from the dead.

But now, scientists say thylacines probably survived in the wild until the 1980s, with a "small chance" they could still be hiding somewhere today. In a study published March 18 in the journal Science of The Total Environment, researchers pored over 1,237 reported thylacine sightings in Tasmania from 1910 onwards.

Related: Stunning colorized footage provides a glimpse of the last known Tasmanian tiger 

The team estimated the reliability of these reports and where thylacines could have persisted after 1936. "We used a novel approach to map the geographical pattern of its decline across Tasmania, and to estimate its extinction date after taking account of the many uncertainties," Barry Brook, a professor of environmental sustainability at the University of Tasmania and lead author of the study, told The Australian.

Thylacines may have survived in remote areas until the late 1980s or 1990s, with the earliest date for extinction in the mid-1950s, the researchers suggest. The scientists posit that a few Tasmanian tigers could still be holed up in the state's southwestern wilderness.

But others are skeptical. "There is no evidence to confirm any of the sightings," Pask said. "One thing that's so interesting about the thylacine is how it evolved to look so much like a wolf and so different to other marsupials. Because of this, it is very hard to tell the difference at distance between a thylacine and [a] dog and this is likely why we still continue to have so many sightings despite never finding a dead animal or unequivocal picture."

If thylacines had survived long in the wild, someone would have come across a dead animal, Pask said. Nevertheless, "it would be possible at this time [in 1936] that some animals persisted in the wild," Pask said. "If there were survivors, there were very few."

While some people search for surviving Tasmanian tigers, Pask and his colleagues want to revive the species. "Because the thylacine is a recent extinction event, we have good samples and DNA of sufficient quality to do this thoroughly," Pask said. "The thylacine was also a human-driven extinction, not a natural one, and importantly, the ecosystem in which it lived still exists, giving a place to go back to." 

De-extinction is controversial and remains extremely complex and costly, according to the National Museum Australia. Those in favor of reviving thylacines say the animals could boost conservation efforts. "The thylacine would certainly help rebalance the ecosystem in Tasmania," Pask said. "In addition, the key technologies and resources created in the thylacine de-extinction project will be critical right now to help preserve and conserve our extant endangered and threatened marsupial species."

Those against it, however, say that de-extinction distracts from preventing newer extinctions and that a revived thylacine population could not sustain itself. "There is simply no prospect for recreating a sufficient sample of genetically diverse individual thylacines that could survive and persist once released," Corey Bradshaw, a professor of global ecology at Flinders University, told The Conversation. 

The Yangtze giant softshell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei), the world's largest freshwater turtle and one of the most endangered species on Earth, is now essentially doomed to extinction after the last known remaining female washed up dead in Vietnam.

The female turtle, which was around 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and weighed 205 pounds (93 kilograms), was discovered dead on April 21 on the shores of Dong Mo Lake, in Hanoi's Son Tay district. The turtle likely died several days earlier, but the cause of death is still unknown, Vietnamese news site VNExpress reported.

This particular female Yangtze giant softshell turtle was just discovered in October 2020. At the time, no other female Yangtze giant softshell turtles were known to exist; the last known female of the species had died after a failed attempt at artificial insemination at Suzhou Zoo in China in April 2019.

When the dead turtle was discovered last month, conservationists had hoped that it belonged to another unknown female, and that the known female might still be alive in the lake. But experts have now confirmed this is not the case.

"It is the same individual that we've been monitoring in recent years," Tim McCormack, director of the Asian Turtle Program for Indo-Myanmar Conservation, told TIME magazine. "It's a real blow."

Related: Most of Florida's newly-hatched sea turtles are female. Why? 

There are now just two known R. swinhoei males left in existence: one in Suzhou Zoo and another that still resides in Dong Mo Lake.

Researchers had hoped that the female and male in Dong Mo Lake would eventually mate and produce a clutch of eggs. Based on its size, the female was likely several decades old, meaning it was probably sexually mature.

"It was a large female that obviously has great reproductive capacity," McCormack said. "She could have potentially laid a hundred eggs or more a year." However, the pair never mated, even though researchers built an artificial nesting beach at the lake for the female to lay her eggs if she ever needed it.

Yangtze giant softshell turtles, also known as Hoan Kiem turtles and Swinhoe's softshell turtles, were once abundant throughout the Yangtze River in China and the surrounding freshwater ecosystems, like Dong Mo Lake. However, historically, humans hunted the turtles for their meat, and they have lost most of their natural habitat, according to the Asian Turtle Program.

There is a chance that other males and females may be found in the future. After all, this female did evade detection for years. But if another female cannot be found in the wild, R. swinhoei will eventually become the latest name on a growing list of species that have been wiped out by humans.

An idyllic beach in Australia turned into a nightmare scene earlier this week, when locals discovered an enormous, beheaded crocodile rotting in the sand.

Some residents think the mutilation could have been an act of vengeance following a recent spate of crocodile attacks against humans along the Queensland coast between Port Douglas and Cooktown, according to news.com.au. But it's still unclear how the 13-foot-long (4 meters; including the head) giant died, according to the Queensland Department for Environment and Science (DES).

The carcass was in such a state of decay that staff were unable to conduct a necropsy, the government agency said. "Due to the state of decomposition, it cannot be determined if there has been any human interference," the DES told Live Science in a prepared statement. "It may be that the crocodile was decapitated (pre- or post-mortem) due to natural predation."

Some locals, however, doubt that another crocodile decapitated the enormous animal and suspect that it was slaughtered in a trophy killing.

"The DES claim is absolutely ridiculous," Tom Chalmers Hayes, a crocodile photographer and conservationist who went to the scene following reports of the dead animal, told Live Science in a message on social media. "I was with the body for three hours and there is absolutely no marking to suggest a crocodile has killed this male and torn it up, very clear machete marks are on the body and around the neck area where the head has been removed."

Related: Giant 14-foot-long crocodile found with human remains in stomach 

The headless crocodile was found on Cow Bay Beach, north of the Daintree River. Based on its size, the large male is considered an "icon" crocodile under Queensland's conservation laws, which means that it is more strictly protected than smaller individuals. Herpetologists estimate it was at least 30 to 40 years old and a top predator.

The loss of a gigantic male like this one could unsettle the social order of other crocodiles in the area. "As we're only beginning to understand the social system of crocodiles, it is difficult to predict how the removal of a single large male crocodile will impact the remaining crocodiles in the area," Cameron Baker, a postdoctoral researcher at Charles Darwin University in Australia who is not involved in the beheading investigation, told Live Science in an email. "However, it will likely represent a period of social unrest and change in the population as individuals try to determine where they sit in the new social hierarchy resulting from this large male's loss."

Conflict could arise between several males vying to replace the dead individual, although crocodiles may not be as territorial as scientists once thought, Baker said.

The killing could also have a ripple effect on the coastal ecosystem. "As top predators, crocodiles potentially play several crucial roles in their environment," Baker explained. "For instance, by limiting the population density and behavior of their prey species, crocodiles inadvertently enhance the survival of their prey's prey. As such, the removal of crocodiles through hunting may unintentionally alter the composition of the ecosystem, reducing its overall health and productivity."

Crocodiles in Queensland have come back from the brink of extinction since the 1970s, when hunters killed them for their skins, according to a 2020 DES report. But they are still listed as a vulnerable species by the DES under the state's Nature Conservation Act 1992.

The beheading follows three serious but non-fatal crocodile attacks on people in the area since February. The last incident occurred on April 8, when a nearly 15-foot-long (4.5 m) croc repeatedly bit a man and nearly drowned him at Archer Point, south of Cooktown. The man managed to escape by sticking his fingers in the animal's eyes.

Black widow spiders in the U.S. are being killed off by an unexpected rival: their invasive relatives, but the motivation behind the highly aggressive attacks is not yet clear, a new study finds. 

The perpetrators, brown widow spiders (Latrodectus geometricus), likely originated in Africa or South America but have since spread to every continent on Earth apart from Antarctica. Brown widows are from the same genus as black widows, of which there are five species, including three that are native to North America: southern black widows (Latrodectus mactans), western black widows (Latrodectus hesperus) and northern black widows (Latrodectus variolus). But unlike black widows, which can all inflict extremely painful and occasionally lethal bites on humans, brown widow bites rarely cause significant harm to people, likely because they inject less venom into their bites despite having venom that is "drop-for-drop" just as toxic, according to the Center for Invasive Species Research (CISR) at the University of California, Riverside. 

In the U.S., brown widow spiders were first spotted in 1935 in Florida, and have subsequently spread across the southern states and into California, according to CISR. Since the invasive species was introduced, southern and western black widow numbers have plummeted, particularly in Florida, where southern black widows have gone "locally extinct" in certain areas.

However, scientists are unsure exactly why this is happening: Other spider species have not been affected by the brown widow's arrival, and there does not appear to be any competition for resources that would force the two widow species to fight one another.

Related: False widow spider preys on baby bat in never-before-seen encounter

In a new study, published Monday (March 13) in the journal Annals of the Entomological Society of America, researchers put solitary brown widows into laboratory tanks with one of three individuals from another spider species — a southern black widow, a red house spider (Nesticodes rufipes) or a triangulate cobweb spider (Steatoda triangulosa), which all overlap with brown widows in the wild — to see how the brown widow reacted to cohabiting with each of the species. 

When paired with the non-widow spiders, the brown widows peacefully cohabited with their tankmates in 50% to 80% of the tests. The rest of the time, one spider would kill and eat the other, but there was little difference between which species would end up victorious.

But when adult brown widows were paired with adult black widows, the invasive species killed and consumed the black widows 40% of the time, the pair peacefully cohabitated together 30% of the time, and in the remaining trials the black widows ended up victorious — but only after defending themselves from an initial brown widow attack. However, when sub-adult individuals of both species were mixed, the brown widows killed and ate their counterparts 80% of the time. Overall, brown widows were six times more likely to kill black widows than the other two spider species. 

In separate experiments, the team also showed that brown widows produce more offspring than black widows and that those offspring begin to reach maturity faster than black widows. This could explain why sub-adult individuals were so adept at killing younger black widows, which in turn would explain why black widow populations are collapsing in areas where brown widows have invaded, the researchers wrote. However, the researchers were surprised at the stark behavioral differences between brown and black widows.

Related: 11 deadliest spiders

"Brown widows are boldly aggressive and will immediately investigate a neighbor and attack if there is no resistance from the neighbor," study co-author Deby Cassill, an ecologist at the University of South Florida (USF), said in a statement. "But the black widows are extremely shy, counterattacking only to defend themselves against an aggressive spider."

The researchers are unsure why the closely related species react so differently to one another and plan to study brown and black widows in other parts of the world, such as Africa, to see if the same trends apply.

"I would love to see if their [brown widows'] behavior and displacement of black widows is something that they have adapted here in North America, or if this behavior is something they exhibit naturally even in areas where they have coevolved with black widows for much longer periods of time," study lead author Louis Coticchio, a doctoral student of conservation biology at USF, said in the statement.

Researchers have stumbled across an effective new way of finding giant Burmese pythons, which are invasive to the U.S. and have been decimating Florida's local ecosystems. 

While carrying out an unrelated study into the movements and behaviors of raccoons and possums in Key Largo, an island off the southern Florida coast, researchers found that the GPS collars they attached to the small mammals could track the invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) after the supersized snakes swallowed the tagged animals whole. 

The team first made this serendipitous discovery in September 2022, when a GPS collar attached to a possum gave off a mortality signal, which is emitted when an animal goes several hours without moving when it should be active. But after a few hours, the collar began to move again. Over the next few days, the collar emitted several other mortality signals between short periods of movement. The researchers realized that the only explanation for this unusual behavior was if the possum had been eaten by a python, the researchers wrote in a statement. 

After tracking the collar for around a month, the team found the python, a 12-foot-long (3.7 meters) female weighing a hefty 66 pounds (30 kilograms), which was then euthanized. A necropsy of the snake revealed that the GPS collar was still intact and fully functional inside the snake, even though the possum had long been digested, the researchers wrote in the statement. 

Related: Jaw-dropping study reveals how pythons can devour super-size prey 

In January, researchers successfully tracked another python, a 77-pound (35 kg) female of unknown length, after the girthy serpent swallowed a raccoon with a GPS collar. And on Feb. 8, the researchers tracked down another GPS collar in a pile of snake poop, which had only recently been passed by another large python, The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported.

In total, three of the 42 GPS collars attached to mammals by researchers have been ingested by snakes, and another six have gone missing. Although it's not possible to definitively say what happened to the missing collars, the researchers suspect that pythons have swallowed them and since moved outside of the study area. 

Pesky pythons

Burmese pythons are massive serpents from Southeast Asia that invaded Florida in the early 1970s after being released as part of the exotic pet trade. The largest Burmese python found in Florida so far was an 18-foot-long (5.5 m) giant weighing a scale-tipping 215 pounds (98 kg) that was caught and killed in June 2022. 

The pythons have been extremely damaging to Florida's ecosystems because they are voracious eaters, reproduce rapidly and have no natural predators. As a result, wildlife officials are legally required to kill the snakes if they find them in the wild (and it is safe to do so).

Related: Gruesome video reveals the moment a 5-foot alligator corpse was cut from the gut of a dead python

In certain areas, such as Everglades National Park, "there are no more mammals to put these collars on," because the snakes have decimated local populations, study researcher Michael Cove, curator of mammals at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, told The South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

In other areas, however, the new tracking technique might work, especially when it comes to locating the snakes in underground tunnels. 

The team wants to continue using GPS collars to track Burmese pythons and are currently planning a new project with local agencies. "We need everything that we can find to remove as many pythons as possible," Cove said.

A new report has painted a grim picture of the future for wildlife in the U.S.: Up to 40% of animal species and 34% of plant species are at risk of going extinct in the country, and up to 41% of U.S. ecosystems are at risk of range-wide collapse, meaning they could be lost forever.

NatureServe, a conservation group focused on biodiversity in North America, released the report Feb. 6. The report ranks all U.S. species on their risk of being wiped out. The categories include secure, apparently secure, vulnerable, imperiled, critically imperiled and possibly extinct; any species in the last four groups are considered to be "at risk of extinction." The rankings are based on more than 50 years of data collected by NatureServe, using a network of more than 1,000 scientists. 

"The data reported by NatureServe is grim," U.S. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., told Reuters. It is "a harrowing sign of the very real problems our wildlife and ecosystems are facing." 

NatureServe President Sean O'Brien said the report's conclusions were "terrifying," but he hopes it will help lawmakers understand the urgency of passing new protections, Reuters reported.

Related: Which animals could go extinct by 2050? 

The animals most at risk are snails, with 75% of freshwater snails and 74% of terrestrial snails at risk of extinction, followed by freshwater mussels (65% at risk), crayfish (55% at risk), shrimps (48% at risk) and bees (37% at risk). Freshwater species seem to be particularly vulnerable due to an increase in waterway pollution and damming activity, the report authors wrote.  

Among the broader major animal groups, amphibians are the worst off, with 42% at risk, followed by fish (35% at risk), reptiles (22% at risk), mammals (18% at risk) and birds (12% at risk). 

Some of the most notable animal species listed as critically imperiled include the red wolf (Canis rufus), the recently cloned black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes), the Mississippi gopher frog (Lithobates sevosus), the highly inbred Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis), Kemp's Ridley sea turtle (Lepidochelys kempii), the North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis) and Rice's whale (Balaenoptera ricei), which was only discovered in 2021.

Among plants, cacti are the most threatened group, with 48% at risk, followed by orchids (27% at risk), trees (20% at risk) and grasses (19% at risk). Some notable at-risk plants include the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), which is imperiled, and the maple leaf oak (Quercus acerifolia), which is critically imperiled. The scientists wrote that plants will be particularly vulnerable in the future because they do not receive the same level of conservation funding as animals do. 

The most imperiled ecosystems are tropical forests, tropical grasslands and tropical cliffs, with 100% of each category being at risk of range-wide collapse, followed by tropical savannas (88% at risk), temperate grasslands and temperate forests (40% at risk).

The highest concentration of at-risk species and ecosystems are located in California and Texas, as well as parts of the Southeast. 

Habitat degradation, land conversion, pollution, climate change and invasive species are the main threats to U.S. wildlife.

The report will help conservationists protect U.S. wildlife by zeroing in on where help is needed the most, researchers wrote.

"If we want to maintain the panoply of biodiversity that we currently enjoy, we need to target the places where the biodiversity is most threatened," O'Brien said. "This report allows us to do that."

As climate change transforms our world, the impacts will be felt unequally, with some animals struggling to survive and others finding ways to overcome the resulting challenges.

This phenomenon is increasingly described as the "winners and losers under climate change," said Giovanni Strona, an ecologist and former associate professor at the University of Helsinki, now a researcher at the European Commission. Strona led a 2022 study, published in the journal Science Advances, that found that under an intermediate emissions scenario, we stand to lose, on average across the globe, almost 20% of vertebrate biodiversity by the century's end. Under a worst-case warming scenario, that loss rises to almost 30%.

So which animals are the "winners," and how well will they really fare under increasing temperatures, drought and habitat loss?

Related: When did scientists first warn humanity about climate change?

Everything is connected

There's no doubt about the threats to Earth's biodiversity from climate change and habitat destruction. In 2022, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) released the Living Planet Report, which described a 69% decline in the relative abundance of monitored species since 1970. Meanwhile, 1 million species now face extinction across our planet because of these twin threats, according to the report. There's now mounting evidence that Earth is experiencing its sixth mass extinction.

Climate change contributes to these extinction risks in complex and interconnected ways, some of which are still-unknown. It will affect populations directly by inducing extreme weather events, like storms; by driving up temperatures or reducing rainfall beyond the thresholds a species needs to survive; and by shrinking key habitats on which animals depend. 

As Strona's research showed, climate change can also have indirect effects that ripple through an ecosystem. He and his team built several model Earths incorporating over 15,000 food webs to represent the connections of many thousand terrestrial vertebrate species. Then, they simulated various climate and land-use change scenarios in these ecosystems. 

Their simulations showed that when climate change directly caused the loss of one species, it resulted in a cascading loss of several species that depend on that one species for food, pollination or other ecosystem services. This domino-like effect, known as "co-extinction," will drive the bulk of terrestrial vertebrate species diversity declines under projected climate change, the research predicts. Because the study didn't model the impact of climate change on communities of insects or plants, these findings are likely also optimistic, Strona said.

The huge complexity of animal relationships within natural ecosystems, plus the uncertainty over how extreme climate change will get, makes it difficult to drill down into such data and pinpoint which animals will do better than others as our world warms. However, Strona's research did pick up on a general trend: "What we found is that larger species and species at high trophic [food chain] levels will be more adversely affected," he told Live Science.

So animals with lower positions in the food chain, such as insects or rodents, may fare better in a warming world.

Related: What would happen to Earth if humans went extinct?

Adaptable animals

Larger species tend to reproduce more slowly, and that's another clue researchers have connected to climate vulnerability.

Another recent study, published in the journal Global Change Biology, looked at 461 animal species across six continents and analyzed the disruptive effects of historical land-use and temperature changes on their populations. "What we found in our study is that species that breed really fast are really good at exploiting new habitats — taking energy and transforming it into offspring," study lead author Gonzalo Albaladejo Robles, a conservation biologist at University College London, told Live Science. 

Faster breeding may benefit species in a changing climate because they're more adaptable to changing habitats; fast breeding cycles give these species an "opportunity to survive these peaks in environmental disruption," such as extreme weather or habitat loss, Albaladejo Robles explained. Meanwhile, slower-breeding animals showed the opposite trend in the study, and their populations declined when temperature and habitat changed.

Size is a factor that may also work against species. For instance, bigger animals might struggle more under climate change because they typically need larger stretches of uninterrupted habitat, as well as more food, which is easily threatened by habitat loss and the landscape and resource impacts of climate change, Albaladejo Robles said. 

"If you're an elephant, it's more likely that you're going to be sensitive to severe droughts, and also deforestation, than other smaller species that need less resources," Albaladejo Robles said. "Generally speaking, small species are going to be more likely to survive human-change interactions, like climate change and land use change." 

Species with more niche diets, such as pandas and koalas, may be at increased risk under environmental change, too. By contrast, the broad diets of generalist feeders, such as crows and raccoons, give them a wide range of foods to fall back on if one food source disappears. 

The ability to migrate and adapt to different habitats could also insure animals against an uncertain future. For instance, many creatures that can survive only at frozen latitudes or in coral reefs, which will dwindle under continued warming, face greater risks. Research has also unearthed evidence that animals such as parrots, bats and shrews are "shape-shifting" over generations, developing bigger beaks, wings and tails to help them cool down more effectively in warmer climates, and possibly making them more adaptable.

All this suggests that animals that are more resilient to habitat disruption and temperature changes are most likely to thrive in a warmer world. For clues to which species that future might include, just look to the unfussy, generalist, fast-breeding species that occupy the most disrupted habitats on our planet: cities. Those include cockroaches, mice, rats, crows, pigeons, some raptors, monkeys and raccoons. 

Related: Could climate change make humans go extinct?

And that's assuming we don't end up with catastrophic levels of heat that stretch beyond the thermal limits of those species. If that scenario were to unfold, we'd be looking at a world populated by extremophiles like tardigrades, also known as water bears. These tiny creatures can go into a state of hibernation that almost completely shuts down their metabolism, enabling some tardigrade species to weather extreme cold of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 196 degrees Celsius), and heat of up to 300 degrees Fahrenheit (150 degrees Celsius).

And yet, even their seemingly indestructible bodies have limits, according to some of Strona's previous research. This study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, simulated how tardigrades would fare under extreme cold and warming based on their temperature-tolerance levels alone. The research confirmed that the tardigrades could withstand incredible extremes. But when the researchers factored in the other species interactions that make up the ecosystems on which they depend, tardigrade populations plummeted under projected extreme warming that would decimate these other animals.

"Tardigrades are super resistant by themselves, but they need the other species to survive," Strona said.

That is the flaw in the idea of "survivor species," he said, because it misses the need for whole ecosystems and their web of complex species interactions to sustain life on Earth, as the Science Advances research showed.

Instead of resting our hopes on some resilient species to survive under climate change, we need to protect whole ecosystems. That means slowing warming by curtailing fossil fuel consumption, limiting habitat destruction and reducing other human impacts on wildlife, experts say. 

Projections can help by shining a spotlight on the most vulnerable animals that need our immediate attention. Even better, paired with the likes of recent research that identifies projected habitat refuges for climate-threatened animals, we can proactively protect whole ecosystems that keep species interconnected. 

There may be short-term "winners" under projected climate change. "But what matters, I think, is the net balance," Strona said. "My perception is that there will be much more losers than winners" — and ultimately, those losers could include us, he said.

The Devils Hole pupfish is small, blue and incredibly endangered. It also may be the most inbred creature on Earth. 

All 263 wild Devils Hole pupfish (Cyprinodon diabolis) live in one location: a 10-foot by 20-foot (3 by 6 meters) cavern in the middle of Devils Hole in Nevada, a detached part of Death Valley National Park, one of the hottest places in the world. Their cavern oasis, located just 50 or so feet (15 meters) below the desert floor, is at least 500 feet (152 m) deep (scientists have yet to find the bottom) and stays at a balmy 92 degrees Fahrenheit (33 degrees Celsius) year-round. The species has lived there, isolated from all other pupfish, for at least 1,000 years, and possibly as long as 20,000 years, according to the National Park Foundation. 

That isolation has led to some very dramatic genetic consequences, scientists reported Nov. 2 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B. They found that Devils Hole pupfish genomes are 58% identical, on average — "the equivalent of five to six generations of full sibling matings," said Christopher Martin, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Berkeley and senior author of the new study. That's enough to make the infamously inbred Habsburg dynasty look wildly diverse.

Related: 'Hell fish' likely killed by dinosaur-ending asteroid is preserved in stunning detail

For the new study, the researchers sequenced the genomes of eight Devils Hole pupfish, as well as one preserved specimen from the 1980s. They found that the fish were missing some seemingly important genes. For example, they lacked a gene normally involved in producing sperm — one that causes infertility if knocked out in other species. "It's kind of surprising that they're even able to reproduce at all," Martin told Live Science.

The fish had also lost a gene that helps other types of pupfish survive in low-oxygen environments — a surprise, given that the warm, stagnant pool they call home is very deoxygenated. At the moment, it's unclear to what degree the absence of these genes is harming the pupfish's overall health. 

"The genome is a complex place," Martin said. He and his team plan to study the fishes' genetics in greater detail to determine what, exactly, each of their genes is doing and how they're compensating for genomic losses.

The intense inbreeding observed in the fish is likely due to their geographic isolation, coupled with multiple population bottlenecks in recent years. In the past two decades alone, the population nearly crashed twice — dipping to 38 individuals in 2006 and as low as 35 in 2013, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

This unique fish was one of the first species to be officially added to the Endangered Species Preservation Act in 1967, which was later folded into the Endangered Species Act of 1973. Since then, thanks to considerable conservation efforts — including the construction of a 100,000-gallon (379,000 liters) replica of Devils Hole that houses a separate captive-bred pupfish population — the species has survived, though it has not always thrived.

"They're still in a precarious situation," Martin said. "But the good news is that human interventions and accidents haven't really made the population worse than it was … I don't think they're doomed."

A recently discovered species of whale that lives in U.S. waters is already on the brink of extinction, according to an open letter signed by more than 100 marine scientists. The international group of researchers is calling for the Biden administration to take "significant action" to save the newfound species, which was only identified last year and currently has around 50 individuals remaining.

Rice's whale, also known as the Gulf of Mexico whale (Balaenoptera ricei), is a baleen whale endemic to the northeast region of the Gulf of Mexico, making it the only cetacean species that lives exclusively in U.S. waters. The species was previously misidentified as an isolated population of Bryde's whale (Balaenoptera brydei), which can be found across the globe. But in January 2021, a study published in the journal Marine Mammal Science analyzed an individual that washed up dead on a beach and found that Rice's whales are both morphologically and genetically distinct from Bryde's whales. The newfound species can grow up to 40 feet (12 meters) long and has one of the most complex vocal repertoires of all known whale species.

Researchers estimate that there are only 51 Rice's whales remaining. The tiny population is under threat from the oil and gas industry, as well as excessive boat traffic and abandoned fishing gear. The species is listed as critically endangered by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, and is also protected by the U.S. Endangered Species Act, as well as the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

Now, in an open letter to the Biden administration published Oct. 13, a group of 101 whale experts from around the world have called on the U.S. government to do more to protect the whales before they are wiped out forever.

Related: Nuclear bomb detectors uncover secret population of blue whales hiding in Indian Ocean

"Unless significant conservation actions are taken, the United States is likely to cause the first anthropogenic extinction of a great whale species," the researchers wrote. "With abundance so low, the loss of even a single whale threatens the survival of the species."

In the letter, the researchers explain that the main threats to Rice's whales are linked to drilling and exploration for fossil fuels in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Researchers estimate that in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon disaster — the largest marine oil spill in human history, which released around 416,000 tons (377,000 metric tons) of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — was responsible for killing around 20% of the Rice's whale population. 

"Another oil spill of the same size could wipe them out almost right away," Erich Hoyt, a research fellow at Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) in the U.K. and author of the "Encyclopedia of Whales, Dolphins and Porpoises," (Firefly Books, 2017) told Live Science in an email.

Scientists believe that the whales are extremely susceptible to noise pollution created during seismic surveys, when fossil fuel companies blast the water column with powerful sound waves to detect potential oil and gas deposits beneath the seafloor. These sound waves can disrupt the communication, navigation and feeding behaviors of cetaceans and even permanently deafen some individuals, the researchers wrote.

In the letter, the researchers highlight that the Biden administration is "presently considering a new five-year program for offshore oil and gas leasing," which could include permits to continue damaging seismic surveys during this time. The scientists urged the government to abandon this program immediately and ban all seismic surveys in the area.

"Continuing with seismic exploration or drilling in the northern Gulf is antithetical to basic principles of conservation and would jeopardize the species' survival and recovery," the researchers wrote.

The researchers also highlighted the threat posed by vessel strikes. The whales spend the night resting within the upper 50 feet (15 m) of the water column, which leaves them "acutely vulnerable to ship strikes," researchers wrote. A number of major shipping routes traverse the whales' habitat, and vessel-strike injuries have been observed in a dead beached whale, as well as a living individual with a significant spinal deformity resulting from a vessel strike, which will likely greatly reduce its lifespan, according to the letter. 

Related: Stressful animation shows blue whale dodging hundreds of ships while trying to feed

Rice's whales are also potentially susceptible to entanglement in ghost fishing gear and to becoming unintended bycatch from large-scale fisheries, Hoyt said. 

The hazards listed in the letter are an issue for most other cetacean species, but they are particularly problematic for a dwindling species like Rice's whales. 

"These threats apply to all whale species to various degrees in other parts of the ocean," Hoyt said. "But especially when a species is greatly reduced in number."

In addition to ending oil and gas exploration in the area, researchers have called for speed limits and redirected routes for shipping companies, and the relocation of fish farms, offshore wind farms and other new developments to outside of the whales’ habitat. The scientists say that if these actions are taken swiftly the species has a chance of surviving.

Related: Antarctica's blue whales return to South Georgia a century after they were nearly wiped out

"Gulf of Mexico whales can recover," the researchers wrote. "Our experience with other baleen whales shows that populations can rebound as conditions improve."

However, even if the Biden administration does implement the sweeping reforms suggested by scientists, the species still faces a "very long road to recovery," Hoyt said. It may also take decades to properly assess if they can or will recover, he added. 

So far, the Biden administration has not commented on the new letter.

A Chinese pet-cloning company has announced the birth of the world's first cloned Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos), which was carried to term by an unlikely surrogate mother — a beagle.  

The cloned female wolf pup, named Maya, and her beagle mother were unveiled to the world in a brief video at a press conference held Sept. 19 by the Sinogene Biotechnology Company in Beijing, according to Chinese news site Global Times. The video was released 100 days after Maya was born: on June 10 in a laboratory in Beijing, according to Sinogene representatives. 

Normally, Sinogene specializes in cloning dead pets, such as cats, dogs and horses, for private clients. But the company now wants to use its expertise to help clone endangered species for conservation purposes, Global Times reported.  

Maya was cloned using DNA collected from a fully grown Arctic wolf, also named Maya, that died in captivity at Harbin Polarland, a wildlife park in northeast China. The original Maya, who was born in Canada before being shipped to China in 2006, died due to old age in early 2021, according to Global Times.  

Related: Why haven't we cloned a human yet? 

The cloning of Maya was successfully completed "after two years of painstaking efforts," Mi Jidong, general manager of Sinogene, said at the company's press conference, according to Global Times.    

Sinogene researchers originally created 137 Arctic wolf embryos by fusing skin cells from the original Maya with immature egg cells from dogs, using a process known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT). Of those embryos, 85 were successfully transplanted into seven beagle surrogates. From those transplanted embryos, just one fully developed during pregnancy, according to Global Times.

The researchers used beagle surrogates because there were not enough female wolves in captivity for the scientists' experiments. Luckily, dogs share enough DNA with wolves for the hybrid pregnancy to gestate successfully.

Maya now lives with her surrogate mother at a Sinogene lab in Xuzhou, eastern China, but the wolf pup will eventually be transferred to Harbin Polarland to live with other Arctic wolves. However, the park's keepers believe she will have to be slowly introduced to the rest of the pack because of her isolated upbringing, according to Global Times. 

Sinogene also revealed that a second Arctic wolf clone, created using DNA from an unknown male, was due to be born Thursday Sept. 22. However, there have been no confirmed reports so far of the pup's birth.

The company also announced a new partnership with the Beijing Wildlife Park to clone more captive species in the future, although no specific projects have yet been announced, according to Global Times. 

In 2019, Sinogene was also involved with a project that produced six identical German shepherd clones, which were then inducted into the Beijing police force, according to CBS News. 

Cloning endangered animals 

Despite reports from Global Times and other media outlets, Arctic wolves, which are a subspecies of gray wolves (Canis lupus) are not an endangered species. Instead, they are listed as least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, though climate change is likely to severely disrupt their food supply in the wild in coming decades, according to WWF.

But endangered species have been cloned by scientists before.  

In 2020, scientists from U.S.-based non-profit conservation organization Revive & Restore successfully cloned an endangered black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes). That same year, the company also successfully cloned an endangered Przewalski’s horse (Equus przewalskii), and their technicians are now attempting to revive the extinct passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) using cloning technology.

"Cloning is a drastically underutilized tool," Ben Novak, lead scientist at Revive & Restore, told Live Science in an email. "In the future, it could be a literal lifeline for species that become rarer or worse, go extinct."

The main benefit of cloning endangered species is that it maintains the amount of genetic diversity within a species, Novak said. If the clones can reproduce with other non-cloned individuals, this gives threatened species a fighting chance to adapt to the selection pressures that are driving them towards extinction, he added.  

Another benefit of cloning is that it can be used in conjunction with existing captive-breeding programs, especially when surrogate mothers from other species are used, Novak said. Rather than taking animals from the wild to create a back-up population in captivity, scientists can take genetic samples from wild animals and create clones in the lab using more readily available surrogates, as they did with Maya and her beagle mother. These genetic backups can then be introduced into the wild to replenish struggling populations, Novak said.   

"For mammals, it appears that two species must share a common ancestor less than 5 million years ago" for the surrogate pregnancy to be successful, Novak said. This opens up the possibility of reviving extinct species by using closely related living surrogate species, he added.

Related: Is it possible to clone a dinosaur?

However, there are also some major limitations to cloning. 

One of the main issues is that not all animals can be successfully cloned yet. To date, only mammals, fish, amphibians and a single insect species have been cloned using SCNT, Novak said. For birds, reptiles and egg-laying mammals, like platypuses and echidnas, SCNT does not work because the eggs do not properly develop, he added.

Cloning also has a very low success rate compared with artificial insemination or in-vitro fertilization, Novak said. As with Maya the wolf pup, researchers often have to create hundreds of embryos and successfully implant them in multiple surrogates for just one animal to be born, which can make cloning an expensive process.

Due to these high costs, the emergence of private entities like Sinogene and Revive & Restore will likely play a key role in the future of conservation cloning. Historically, most cloning research has been done by universities that are underfunded, Novak said. Therefore, "the partnership of for-profit companies with conservation programs is key to turning cloning from a seldom-researched technique into a valuable conservation tool."

For cloning advocates, the birth of Maya is another step in the right direction for this area of research.

"It's great to see more wildlife cloning work being done," Novak said. "I hope all these recent achievements in cloning show the world that cloning is ready to use as a beneficial tool for wildlife conservation."

Originally published on Live Science.