An ecological "superspreader" event may be imminent as more than 1,500 ships continue to idle in the closed Strait of Hormuz, with the potential to cause serious impacts for human health and global marine ecosystems, scientists warn.

In a study published July 22 in the journal Biological Invasions, scientists explain how the hundreds of stranded commercial vessels sitting idle on both sides of the strait are being colonized by marine microbes, algae, seaweed, barnacles and other invertebrates. The problem is that once these ships start moving again, these organisms will be spread all around the world.

"The unprecedented scale and duration of this spring and summer mass lay-up of large commercial ships has created ideal conditions for a marine invasive species 'super-spreader' event," Mario Tamburri, a professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science and first author of the study, said in a statement.

The Iran War is already having devastating impacts around the world. After the U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran on Feb. 28, Tehran retaliated by restricting shipping traffic through the Strait of Hormuz ‪—‬ a critical shipping route that connects the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman and facilitates the transport of 20% of the world's oil supply, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

But the economic impacts of the waterway's prolonged closure are only part of the story.

While it's common for cargo ships to linger for a day or two at most ports, the study authors say these organisms — which are arriving from all over the world and are now mixing and spreading among the other stationary vessels — really begin to flourish after about 10 days of inactivity.

When ships are idle for longer than 10 days, these organisms start to colonize "aggressively" as the special coatings that protect ships from contamination start to work less effectively, the researchers write. And once these organisms are brought into new environments, they can wreak havoc on local ecosystems.

"Marine invasions are hard to predict but it is possible for several species to establish themselves in new habitats and with some causing significant environmental and economic impacts," Tamburri told Live Science in an email.

Tamburri pointed to the example of zebra mussels (Dreissena polymorpha) in the Great Lakes. The mollusks, which are native to Europe and Asia, are thought to have been introduced to the U.S. in the 1980s via water discharged from large European cargo ships, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The impacts of these invasive animals are widespread: They filter out algae that native species need for food and attach to native mussels, preventing them from moving, feeding or reproducing, according to the National Park Service (NPS). They also clog pipes and water supply systems, which cost millions of dollars to fix.

Each female zebra mussel can produce thousands of eggs, so once populations are established, there is "very little" that can be done to remove them, the NPS notes.

In addition to outcompeting native species for space and resources, invasive species can spread disease.

"One of the less perceptible concerns from biological invasions is the potential spread of infective stages of parasites and diseases that are either entrained within ship ballast tanks or associated with organisms attached to ship hulls," April Blakeslee, an associate professor of biology at East Carolina University, told Live Science in an email. Parasites and diseases introduced by ships could then spill over to native species, which could affect ecologically and/or commercially valuable species, or possibly pose concerns for human health, Blakeslee added.

In other words, these species could spread diseases with the potential to infect local wildlife and humans, as well as fisheries and aquaculture.

Tamburri said the areas most at risk are first ports of call with similar temperatures and salt levels to the Gulf region, particularly ports in India, Singapore, Greece, Spain, the Netherlands and several ports in the Middle East.

So what can be done to stop this "superspreading" event before it happens? According to the researchers, cleaning ships in the water before they leave the Gulf region could significantly reduce the spread of these organisms. Estimating the risks posed by specific ships before departure and setting up monitoring networks and early detection systems at high-risk ports may also limit the damage.

"While the human and economic consequences of events like the war in the Middle East will always remain the highest priority, ecological impacts cannot be overlooked," the researchers wrote.

The spotted lanternfly has spread across the United States with unrelenting speed — and now we have a clue as to why: living in cities seems to have helped these invasive insects evolve to be more resistant to stresses.

"Cities may act as evolutionary incubators that help an invasive species to better deal with pressures like heat and pesticides, which then helps them to better adapt to new environments," lead author Fallon (Fang) Meng, a biologist at New York University, told Live Science.

The spotted lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula) is a planthopper that uses its long mouthparts to suck sap from plants. The insect is native to China, but has spread through South Korea, Japan and to the U.S., where it was first detected in Pennsylvania in 2014, but is now seen in 19 states in the eastern U.S.

Its preferred host plant is the tree of heaven (Ailanthus altissima), which is also an invasive species — but it is able to sup on a wide range of plants, including economically valuable ones like grapevines, hops, maples, fruit trees and hardwood trees.

Spotted lanternflies can weaken plants, and as they feed, they also excrete a sticky, sugary fluid that promotes the growth of sooty mold. What's more, when bees decide to forage on this sugary waste rather than visiting flowers it gives the honey they produce a smoky aroma and a lingering aftertaste, although this honey is still safe to eat.

All this adds up to a potentially huge financial impact. For example, a 2019 study estimated that in Pennsylvania alone, if uncontrolled, the insect's effects could cost $324 million annually.

Lanternfly genetics

To get a better handle on how the lanternflies have adapted so well to life in the United States, researchers sequenced the genomes of lanternflies from urban and rural areas in Shanghai, China, and from New York City, Connecticut and New Jersey. The study was published Wednesday (Feb. 4) in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

In the lanternfly populations in China, they found clear genetic differences between those in the urban and rural areas. "Even though they're just 30 kilometers [19 miles] away, they have very strong population differentiation," Meng said.

This is probably because although lanternflies can fly, they need to feed continuously, so they stick close to the host trees on which they depend. This means it is easy for populations to stay separate, Meng added.

This separation means the urban lanternflies in Shanghai evolved genetic tolerance to stresses that the rural ones didn't, adapting them to the hotter conditions of cities, and boosting their ability to detoxify and metabolize toxins and pesticides.

In the U.S., however, the lanternflies were genetically similar across all locations, even though some were sourced from locations 124 miles (200 kilometers) apart. The same genes that evolved for city living were further adapted in U.S. populations, according to the study.

Using demographic modeling on the genomic data to reconstruct the recent history of the lanternflies, researchers revealed three genetic bottlenecks, when populations were established from a limited pool of insects. One was more than 170 years ago, when Shanghai underwent rapid urbanization. The second aligned with when lanternflies moved from China to South Korea in 2004, and the third was in 2014 when the insects arrived in Pennsylvania — probably hitchhiking on goods shipped from overseas.

Adapting to China's cities may have primed the lanternfly to tolerate other hot, polluted environments, Meng said. "We should study invasive species and urbanization as interconnected parts of a whole. Those two major aspects are too often studied in isolation, but their effects actually can compound in synergistic and surprising ways."

The ability to handle a wider range of toxins might be helping spotted lanternflies spread in the U.S., said Zach Ladin, an ecologist at the University of Delaware, who wasn't involved in the study.

The relatively high densities of tree of heaven give spotted lanternflies a foothold in many cities, he told Live Science, "but some of those genes that they found that are related to overcoming toxic chemical exposure could really help them switch hosts and take advantage of other plants."

Ladin added that the new genetic information could help people slow or contain the spread of spotted lanternflies. "From a chemical control perspective, now we have some genes to target which could be important in making sure we're not just driving resistance to certain chemicals," he said.

Invasive ants whose sting can cause fatal allergic reactions in humans are surging across the U.S. Southeast and beyond — and experts are growing increasingly alarmed.

Asian needle ants (Brachyponera chinensis) went relatively unnoticed for many years following their introduction to the U.S. roughly a century ago, but entomologists recently documented their spread from a handful of southeastern states to New England and the Midwest. Asian needle ants are capable of invading many of North America's temperate forests, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), and with the spring swarming season about to start, there's a chance that these ants could trigger medical emergencies up and down the country.

"We are now considering it a medically important pest," Dan Suiter, a professor of urban entomology at the University of Georgia, told Fox Weather on April 29.

Suiter said he recently noticed an uptick in Asian needle ant stings. In 2024, he received three calls from people who suffered anaphylaxis as a result of Asian needle ant stings — a high number compared with previous years, he told Fox Weather.

Anaphylaxis is an acute, whole-body allergic reaction that happens very quickly in some people after exposure to certain medicines, foods or insect stings. Symptoms include a rapid and weak pulse, a skin rash, nausea and vomiting, according to the Mayo Clinic. Anaphylaxis can be fatal, because it causes the immune system to release a flood of chemicals that constrict the airways, which prevents breathing. These chemicals also trigger a dangerous drop in blood pressure, increasing the risk of cardiac arrest.

Related: 'The parasite was in the driver's seat': The zombie ants that die gruesome deaths fit for a horror movie

Ants are common pests, but "it gets a little bit more serious when the sting of an insect can be life-threatening to people who suffer anaphylaxis," Suiter said. It is unclear how many people have died from Asian needle ant stings globally and in the U.S. since their introduction.

Asian needle ants are small, shiny, dark brown-to-black ants native to China, Japan and Korea. They were first discovered in the U.S. in 1932 following introduction via shipping — but by that point they were already present in at least three southeastern states, according to the USDA.

Asian needle ants are not aggressive or defensive of their nests in the way that fire ants (Solenopsis) are, but they will deliver a venomous sting if they get trapped inside human clothing or beneath someone's hand. People in affected areas should look out for these ants' light-orange antennae and leg-tips, although it takes an experienced eye to positively identify the species, according to the USDA.

There's no way to predict who will get anaphylaxis after an Asian needle sting, but people who react adversely to other insect stings or carry an EpiPen should be especially cautious of these ants, Suiter said. Regardless of whether someone is vulnerable to anaphylaxis, Asian needle ant stings cause severe pain at the site of the sting, according to the USDA.

There have been some control measures to limit the spread of Asian needle ants, but these efforts are extremely costly, according to the USDA. Asian needle ants typically nest beneath logs, stones and leaf litter, but they may also be found in wood piles. They do not form trails like other ants but instead walk alone and chaotically, Suiter said.

"This critter kind of wanders around," he said. "It looks lost."

A huge Burmese python has been found swallowing a deer whole in Florida's Everglades. The impressive feat challenges what gape models suggest the invasive snakes are physically capable of.

"It felt like we were literally catching the serial killer in the act and it was intense to observe [in] real time," Ian Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist and science coordinator at the conservation organization Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told Live Science in an email.

The female Burmese python (Python bivittatus) measured 14.8 feet (4.5 meters) long and weighed 115 pounds (52 kilograms). It was discovered feasting on a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) that weighed 76.9 pounds (35 kg) — almost 67% of the snake's mass. To devour the deer, the snake's mouth stretched so wide it reached 93% of its maximum gape, according to a study published Aug. 22 in the journal Reptiles & Amphibians.

"This was the most intense and impressive sight we have observed in 12 years of tracking pythons in southwestern Florida," Bartoszek, one of the study authors, said. "It was truly primal and felt like a scene that had been playing out for millions of years wherever you have large snakes. Unfortunately our native wildlife in Florida have not evolved with this apex predator and you are seeing that result with these images."

Related: The biggest snake in the world (and 10 other giant serpents)

Burmese pythons are an invasive species in the Everglades and were introduced at some point in the mid to late 20th century. The first sighting was in 1979, and by the 1990s they had gained a stronghold, feasting on native species while having no natural predators to control their population. While the current population size is unknown, experts estimate there could be hundreds of thousands in Florida. Over the last few decades, Burmese pythons have decimated local ecosystems, wiping out several mammal species.

Burmese pythons are known to eat deer and even alligators, but finding the predators in the act is challenging, limiting how much scientists know about what these apex predators are capable of eating, and therefore how much of an impact they're having on the ecosystem.

Related: Which animal has the stretchiest mouth?

According to the study, the previously assumed maximum gape for a Burmese python (the width it can open its jaws) was around 8.6 inches (22 centimeters). However, the researchers examined three of these snakes — including the 14.8 foot python — and found they had a maximum gape of 10.2 inches (26 cm). The discovery has "significantly affected" models showing what Burmese pythons are physically capable of swallowing, the researchers wrote.

"These observations and this study serves as another warning sign to the threat imposed on the Everglades ecosystem by the Burmese python," Bartoszek said.

Burmese pythons can swallow huge prey because their jaws aren't fused at the front, which enables them to stretch far wider than similar-sized snake species. "Our anatomical measurements indicate this deer was very near the size limit on the prey that could be consumed by this snake," study author Bruce Jayne, professor of biological sciences at the University of Cincinnati, said in a statement emailed to Live Science. "Hence, these snakes resemble overachievers by sometimes testing the limits of what their anatomy allows rather than being slackers that eat only 'snack size' prey."

The deer-eating snake was located with the help of a male python called Ronin. Ronin is fitted with a tracking device that leads researchers to females — part of a program that releases males as "scout snakes" during the breeding season. Burmese pythons are prolific breeders, with each female able to produce dozens of eggs each season. Removing females is a way of controlling the population.

"Each breeding season [Ronin] leads us to multiple females that we humanely remove before they have a chance to lay eggs," Bartoszek said. "All of the pythons we remove are humanely euthanized. We have a lot of respect for the Burmese python and they are here through no fault of their own. However we understand the impact they are having on native wildlife and are not sitting on the sidelines."

An Atlantic comb jelly known as the "sea walnut" has the ability to reverse its own aging process, a new study suggests.

When food is scarce or the sea creature is injured, the gelatinous invertebrate can develop backward into its larval form, which has two tentacles to catch food. The adult form, which looks like a small pair of transparent lungs, lacks these tentacles.

The sea walnut (Mnemiopsis leidyi) is the third-known animal species, and the first-known comb jelly (Ctenophora), that can revert to an earlier life stage after already reaching adulthood, according to the study, which was published Aug. 10 on the preprint database BioRxiv. (It has not yet been peer-reviewed).

Scientists previously showed that a handful of cnidarians — a group that includes jellyfish, sea anemones and corals — can develop backward, but only before reaching sexual maturity. The two other documented species that can develop backward as adults are the so-called immortal jellyfish (Turritopsis dohrnii) and the dog tapeworm (Echinococcus granulosus).

Age reversal in comb jellies "confirms that reversal development might be more widespread than previously thought," researchers wrote in the study, which builds on previous work investigating the sea walnut's hardiness.

Related: Extreme longevity: The secret to living longer may be hiding with nuns... and jellyfish

The sea walnut is native to the western Atlantic Ocean, but the species has spread to become an invasive nuisance in Europe and Asia. M. leidyi can survive in the ballast water of ships for weeks despite the lack of food, which is how researchers think the comb jellies made it across the Atlantic. The species is now found in the Black and Caspian seas, where it has contributed to the collapse of fisheries by competing with native creatures for food, as well as in the Mediterranean, Baltic and North seas.

To shed light on the sea walnut's survival tactics, the researchers carried out experiments in which they starved one group of comb jellies and physically injured another by removing tissue from their lobes. (Like other ctenophores, sea walnuts can regenerate entirely from even a small chunk of flesh. The same researchers previously found that the sea walnut's nervous system is fused, which may confer some advantage for tissue repair and healing.)

Starved and amputated sea walnuts shrunk into tiny blobs, but they didn't die. When the researchers fed both groups again, they observed that 13 out of the 65 comb jellies tested had grown tentacles, a sign they had regressed to the larval stage.

Co-author Joan J. Soto-Angel, a marine biologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Bergen in Norway, told Science that the jellies used their tentacles to capture food to which they would not have had access as adults, tapping into a new ecological niche. With enough food, the comb jellies eventually reached their original size again and regrew their lobes. The creatures even regained their ability to reproduce, according to the study.

Finding a third animal capable of aging in reverse "was quite a surprise," Soto-Angel said. The process by which M. leidyi regresses to its larval form is different from how the immortal jellyfish does it, he said, but both animals could help researchers understand aging better.

Comb jellies are also one of the oldest extant animal lineages and possibly the sister group to all animals, making them a unique model to study evolution.

It remains unclear whether the comb jellies really turned back the clock on their age, or whether they simply shrunk, Yoshinori Hasegawa, a zoologist at the Kazusa DNA Research Institute in Japan who was not involved in the research, told Science. “It looks like an imperfect rejuvenation,” Hasegawa said.

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.

Feral "super pigs" in Canada could soon trample across the border and invade the northern U.S., a new study finds.

The feral pigs are a mixed population of domestic swine (Sus scrofa domesticus), wild boar (Sus scrofa) — which were introduced to Canada in the late 1980s for meat and recreational shooting — and hybrids of the two, according to the Canadian Council on Invasive Species. Keepers released the boars and some pigs when the market for boar meat plunged in the early 2000s, thinking that the animals wouldn't survive the harsh Canadian prairie winter and deep snow, according to the new study. But instead, the pigs thrived.

"These pigs have high reproductive rates, are very mobile, and have a high capacity to spread," study co-author Ryan Brook, a professor of animal and poultry science at the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, told the hunting and fishing magazine Field & Stream. As it turns out, the pigs are also resistant to the cold, so Brook and his colleagues dubbed them "super pigs." 

Super pigs may eventually cross the border into North and South Dakota, Montana and Minnesota, according to the study, which was published May 9 in the journal Biological Invasions. While the southern U.S. already has around 6.9 million feral hogs, much of the north remains feral pig-free thanks in part to intensive control efforts.

Related: Do pigs sweat?

But these control efforts may not be able to hold off a pig invasion from the north, which could inflict "tremendous damage" on agricultural production and ecosystems, Brook said. "They're rooters and tear the ground up," he said. "They are an ecological trainwreck. They eat anything from small mammals like mice to ducks and geese, all the way up to adult whitetail deer that they kill and eat."

To map their expansion through Canada and determine where they might go next, Brook and his colleagues fitted 22 feral pigs with GPS collars. The collars transmitted the animals' location every 3 hours for 13 months. Some collars failed or fell off, so the researchers only kept data from 10 pigs. They then matched the location data with habitat type and created a model to simulate the pigs' movements.

"We went from having a general concern about pigs crossing the U.S.-Canada border to having very detailed maps showing where they're most likely to move and establish populations," Brook said.

The pigs favored areas with a patchwork of wetland, deciduous forests and crops that provided both food and cover. This type of habitat is widespread across the northern prairies and along the border, according to the study. The researchers found that expansion was most likely to occur near bodies of water, including Fort Peck Lake in Montana, Devils Lake in North Dakota and the Missouri River. 

"Our results show the potential for rapid and uncontrolled expansion of wild pigs in the northern prairies of North America," the researchers wrote in the study. To mitigate the risk, Brook and his colleagues suggested planting shorter crops that provide less cover or preventing wild pigs from accessing their favorite patchwork habitats. This can be done by erecting fences or through trapping, according to the Canadian Council on Invasive Species.

Some wild pig populations in the prairie province of Manitoba, Canada, were just a two- or three-day trot from the U.S. border, Brook said. "If something doesn't change soon, we're in serious trouble in Canada, and we're not being good neighbors if we're letting them run wild into the U.S. as well," he said.

Giant water bugs that can deliver painful bites are invading the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, a study has found.

The bugs, also called "toe biters," belong to the Lethocerus genus, which includes bird-eating species that can grow to around 4.7 inches (12 centimeters) long. Researchers discovered the fearsome bugs with the help of swimmers on the island's east coast and warned the public to look out for more.

"Cypriots should keep their eyes open and their toes out of the water," the study authors said in a statement on March 20.  The researchers presented their findings in a study published Dec. 31, 2023, in the Journal of "Grigore Antipa" National Museum of Natural History.

Giant water bugs live in freshwater habitats such as ponds and marshes around the world, according to the National Park Service. They're equipped with pincer-like appendages and venomous saliva, which allows them to immobilize and suck the liquid out of their prey. These bugs are also known to bite unsuspecting humans between the toes, hence why they're called "toe-biters," though this bite is nontoxic and we're far too big to be their prey.

Related: Watch bizarre video of termites trapped in 'death spiral'

Lethocerus is found near Cyprus in the mainland countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Israel and Egypt but has never before been observed on the island. In the new study, the team looked at posts on local Facebook groups between 2020 and 2021 to collect records of the bugs and learn more about their sudden arrival.

"The records reported in this study were based almost entirely on people who posted photographs and videos on social media groups requesting species determination," the authors wrote in the study.

Seven giant water bugs were recorded on the eastern lowland part of the island, and the researchers went out and found two of these specimens. The retrieved bugs belonged to the species Lethocerus patruelis, which can grow to about 3 inches (8 cm) long. However, the team couldn't identify the remaining bugs' species from photos alone and so recorded them as Lethocerus.

The researchers suspect the bugs flew over from the mainland — but they're not sure why they crossed the open sea. One theory is that lights on the island's east coast attracted the bugs. Another idea is that the bugs migrated to the island for food or were carried there by the elements.

"The specimens landed exhausted on the shoreline, or in some cases in the sea, which could indicate that they were transferred by wind or sea currents from nearby countries," the authors wrote.

While the researchers are confident these bugs are new to the island, and more could be coming, they don't think Lethocerus is a threat to Cyprus' ecosystem. The country has habitats similar to the mainland and hosts some of the bugs' natural predators, including white storks (Ciconia ciconia) and black kites (Milvus migrans).

"This could ensure the biological control of a possible established population," the authors wrote.

Remarkable footage captures the moment a red-headed woodpecker evicts a starling squatting in its nest by yanking it out of a tree trunk.

Woodpeckers and starlings are cavity nesters, meaning they hollow out nesting holes rather than building them from scratch, but starlings often invade other birds' nests and harass their owners. 

When Emily Tornga first spotted the red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus), she didn't realize it was dealing with an unwanted tenant. 

"I thought I was watching the woodpecker clear out a nest hole, but then, much to my surprise, the starling emerged and the fight you see in the video began," Tornga, who co-founded the Sparrow Appreciation Society, told Live Science in an email. "I have never seen anything like this before with this colony of red-headed woodpeckers." Tornga filmed the encounter and posted it on Instagram.

Related: Watch thousands of starlings perform an 'incredible ballet of life and death' in new murmuration footage

Common starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), also known as European starlings, are an invasive species in North America and were first released in New York City's Central Park in 1890 by Shakespeare enthusiasts who wanted to introduce all the bird species mentioned in the playwright's work to America.

Starlings don't shy away from attacking and killing native birds and their babies once they have set their sights on a nest.

"Starlings are a huge problem for red-headed woodpeckers," Tornga said. "Happy to say the starling moved on after this encounter."

Following the fight, the woodpecker flew to the top of its tree and sat for a moment, Tornga said.

Red-headed woodpeckers are fierce defenders of their territory and quick to pick fights with other birds, including brazen starlings. Despite this, red-headed woodpeckers suffered a 54% decline in population between 1966 and 2019, according to the North American Breeding Bird Survey.

One of the primary drivers of this decline is the limited number of suitable trees left to hollow out nests from, as these trees are being felled. "They nest in dead or dying trees in mature stands of forest," Tornga said. "Due to land development, these habitats are becoming harder and harder to come by." 

An enormous mound of Burmese pythons entwined in a 7-foot-wide (2.1 meters) mating ball was recently found in Florida's Everglades after conservationists followed several tagged males that were out looking for sex.

The mating ball contained a 14-foot-long (4.2 m) female and five males, and two additional males were found close to the aggregation, Ian Bartoszek, a wildlife biologist and science coordinator at the conservation organization Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told Live Science in an email.

"It is an impressive sight to see a large breeding aggregation of pythons in the wild," he said. "They are truly beautiful creatures and are here unfortunately as a byproduct of the pet trade."

Bartoszek and colleagues headed into the Everglades in mid-February to track down invasive Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) at the peak of their breeding season. The Conservancy's tracking program has been running since 2013. Through the program, adult male pythons are tagged with a radio transmitter and then released as "scout snakes" to lead researchers to other pythons during the breeding season in early spring. The newfound snakes are then removed from the wild, with the primary goal of preventing breeding females from producing more offspring.

Related: Enormous Burmese python killed in Florida Everglades was about to lay 60 eggs

The captured pythons are humanely euthanized and necropsied in a lab, to collect data on their condition, breeding potential and gut contents, for example. Scout snakes, on the other hand, are left in the wild to lead the trackers to more pythons.

To date, the program has led to the removal of 1,300 pythons, with a combined weight of over 35,000 pounds (16,000 kg), from 150 square miles ( 390 square kilometers) of public and private land across southwestern Florida.

During the February snake-finding expedition, the team came across three mating aggregations. The first mating ball found included a 16-foot-long (4.9 m) female weighing 125 pounds (57 kilogram) and two males, with their tagged snake hiding nearby.

"We didn't have a bag with us large enough for the female so we had to transport her in a kayak and get her back to the field truck after hiking her out of the woods over our shoulders," Bartoszek said.

The second mating ball with six snakes was the biggest encountered on the trip, with the team finding a "pile of pythons" entwined, he added. In addition, a snake scout was found mating with a 13-foot-long (4 m) female.

In total, they captured 11 pythons with a combined weight of more than 500 pounds (227 kg).

"This was a record for us for the amount and total weight of snakes collected in a single day over ten years of the program," Bartoszek said. The scout snakes were left in the wild to slither another day.

Burmese pythons are thought to have been introduced to the Everglades at some point before 1985 when they were released into the wild via the pet trade. Their numbers grew slowly until the 1990s, when they skyrocketed. Since these generalist predators gained a foothold, they have decimated populations of native species, including mammals and birds, and thus disrupted this fragile ecosystem.

"It often feels like a CSI wildlife crime scene in our lab during necropsies and we often see first-hand how they are getting so large," Bartoszek said. "In fact 2 of the 3 females captured during the previously mentioned mating aggregations had the remains of white tailed deer inside.

"We see the remains of white-tailed deer inside of pythons often and it should sound an alarm," he said. "The Burmese python is the invasive animal issue of our time for native wildlife in Florida."

Giant, invasive Jorō spiders have spread across several U.S. states during the last decade. Now, scientists have discovered these palm-size critters are potentially much more tolerant to living in cities than other species and appear to thrive alongside major roads, which could help give them a foothold (or eight) in major cities along the Eastern Seaboard.

Jorō spiders (Trichonephila clavata) are a species of orb-weaving spiders — a group known for creating highly symmetrical, circular webs. Jorōs are easily recognizable thanks to the distinctive yellow bands that adorn their otherwise black legs. They also build unique webs that can be more than 6 feet (1.8 meters) across and appear golden when they reflect sunlight. 

Female Jorōs, which can grow to around 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) across — around double the size of males — also have blue stripes and red patches on their predominantly yellow abdomens. 

After mating in early autumn, female Jorōs lay large, web-bound clusters of up to 400 eggs before dying off at the start of winter, along with the males. When the eggs hatch in spring, the baby spiders create parachute-like webs that enable them to fly up to 100 miles (160 kilometers) away from where they were born. 

Jorō spiders are endemic to Asia, and until recently they were only found in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. However, in 2014, researchers spotted several Jorōs in the U.S. near Atlanta, Georgia. Experts believe these invasive individuals were accidentally brought to the U.S. inside a shipping container, according to a 2015 study. 

In the years since, Jorō spiders have quickly multiplied and spread in the U.S. thanks to their ability to widely disperse after birth. They are now found across Georgia, as well as in South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee. Additional sightings have also been reported in Alabama, Maryland, Oklahoma and West Virginia, and experts believe they could spread across the entire U.S. East Coast in the future.

Related: What is the deadliest spider in the world?

Since their arrival, researchers have noticed that Jorō webs are often located in close proximity to major highways. This is surprising because the vibrations caused by busy roads normally interfere with spiders' ability to hunt: When smaller critters get trapped in spider webs, they struggle to get free, which alerts the spiders to their presence, but busy roads can drown out these vibrations. Spiders are also very sensitive to vibrations in general.

In a new study published Feb. 13 in the journal Arthropoda, researchers investigated how vibrations impacted Jorō spiders. In the laboratory, the study team used tuning forks to simulate the vibrations given off by highways to see how it impacted the arachnids' ability to hunt simulated prey placed in their webs.

Across 350 trials, vibrated Jorōs attacked simulated prey 59% of the time, while non-vibrated Jorōs pounced on the dummy prey 65% of the time. The trials also showed that the "roadside" spiders were able to maintain a similar healthy body weight to the other spiders, indicating that the vibrations were not impacting them in the long term.

"The spiders seem to be able to make a living there," lead study author Andy Davis, an ecologist at the University of Georgia, said in a statement. They are surprisingly "urban tolerant," he added.

It is unclear what long-term effects Jorō spiders will have on the ecosystems they invade. Last year, researchers revealed that the spiders are unusually shy and non-aggressive toward other spiders. However, without a natural predator seeking them out, their numbers will likely continue to rise, which could help them outcompete other species for resources.  

But whatever their ecological effects, the new findings suggest these arachnid invaders aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

"I don't know how happy people are going to be about it, but I think the spiders are here to stay," study co-author Alexa Schultz, a third-year ecology student at the University of Georgia, said in the statement. And they could end up in places "where you wouldn’t imagine a spider to be," she added.

Australia is about to embark on a massive annual cane toad killing spree — known as the Great Cane Toad Bust — to put a dent in the numbers of this invasive pest. Now, scientists are proposing a humane method to purge the toxic toads.

Instead of bludgeoning cane toads (Rhinella marina, formerly Bufo marinus) with cricket bats and golf clubs, or poisoning them with harsh chemicals, scientists advise bagging the toads and sticking them in the fridge. The cold puts the amphibians into a state of torpor and shuts their pain receptors off. People can then transfer the toads to the freezer to finish them off humanely, said Rick Shine, a professor of biology at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.

"As a toad cools, its metabolism slows down and it becomes very inactive," Shine told Live Science in an email. "Even its brain shuts down. So a cold toad doesn't feel pain, and the toad never knows what is going on — it just falls asleep and never wakes up."

Cane toads naturally experience temperatures dropping at night, so their bodies don't go into shock when they are initially put in the fridge, Shine said. In a 2015 study, Shine and his colleagues found that the toad's brain activity declined smoothly during freezing and produced no detectable pain signals. By the time ice crystals start to form in a toad's tissues, "it's not aware of anything," he said.

Scientists introduced cane toads from Hawaii to Queensland, Australia, in 1935 to exterminate cane beetles (Dermolepida albohirtum) that were ravaging newly planted sugarcane crops. However, this effort backfired, because cane toads showed no interest in the beetles and multiplied uncontrollably. The toads, which secrete venom that can kill animals that eat them, spread to coastal New South Wales, the Northern Territory and parts of northwestern Australia. Everywhere they went, they triggered declines in native predators and caused damage to ecosystems.

Related: 'Monster cane toad' dubbed 'Toadzilla' found in Australia

Cane toads still wreak havoc today, prompting the environmental non-profit Watergum to organize the Great Cane Toad Bust, an annual campaign to kill as many toads as possible in a week. This year's kill-athon — the third nationwide bust and the first to target tadpoles as well as adult toads — will take place between Jan. 13 and Jan. 21.

"The Great Cane Toad Bust is Australia's biggest toad bust," Nikki Tomsett, Watergum's invasive species project officer, told Live Science in an email. "It's all about taking collective action to effectively and humanely control cane toads, which are an invasive pest species in Australia." 

The campaign has been successful so far, with people removing over 50,000 cane toads from their local environment in a single week, Tomsett said. "This year we're aiming to beat that record," she said.

Cane toads can live for more than 10 years in the wild, Tomsett said. Female toads produce as many as 35,000 eggs every time they breed, which means every toad matters when it comes to toad busting.

The cool-and-freeze method "is currently considered best practice for the humane euthanasia of cane toads," Tomsett said. "Blunt force trauma and most chemical applications are not considered humane, and pose a threat to wildlife and pets, as cane toads euthanized in this way are typically left in the environment and are still toxic after death."

People who club the toads to death also risk hitting the poison glands, which can cause temporary blindness in humans if it gets into the eyes," ABC News reported.

Australians are encouraged to keep busting cane toads after Jan. 21, Tomsett added.

The second-largest Burmese python ever discovered in South Florida has been captured after give people sat on the enormous snake, which was found stretched out across a road in the Big Cypress National Preserve.

Initially, the python-hunters thought the female snake was an alligator due to its size. "It was more than a snake, it was a monster," conservationist Mike Elfenbein told CBS News.

After realizing it was a Burmese python (Python bivittatus), one of the men, Carter Gavlock, grabbed the snake's tail to constrain the animal, but it dragged him away. "That was a big mistake because the snake damn near took him into the canal. There was nothing he could do to stop it," Elfenbein said. Eventually, five men had to sit on the snake to capture it.

The python weighed 198 pounds (90 kilograms) and measured 17.2 feet (5.2 meters), making it the second-heaviest ever caught in Florida. The heaviest Burmese python was captured in 2022 and weighed 215 pounds (98 kg). 

Related: Burmese pythons are helping rats take over Florida's Everglades — and that could help spread disease

Burmese pythons are native to southeast Asia and considered an invasive species in Florida. These snakes have a large breeding population within and around the Everglades and have proved devastating to native wildlife, despite efforts over recent years to reduce their numbers.

Pythons are hard to detect, which makes population estimates difficult, but tens of thousands of the snakes are thought to live in Florida. Research from the U.S. Geological Survey published this year found that more than 10,000 Burmese pythons have been captured in the state in the past five years.

Nobody knows exactly how the species first arrived in the state. In the 1970s, the animals were popular in the pet trade and may have been released both accidentally and intentionally. Burmese pythons began to thrive in Florida in the 1980s and 1990s and have spread across nearly all of southern Florida.

Limiting the spread of Burmese pythons is a key goal of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, and it is legal for people to hunt and kill them humanely. 

Earlier this year, a 16-foot-long (5 m) Burmese python was caught and killed in the Florida Everglades with a clutch of 60 eggs that were days from being laid.

A herpetologist in France has captured a remarkable photo of a snake choking as it attempted to eat a fish the size of its own head.

While many snake species eat fish — and many can open their jaws wide enough to gulp down large prey — the fish species in this case was invasive in this part of Europe. The scientist who spotted it says that the encounter should prompt more research into the relationship between fish-eating snakes and invasive species.

Nicolas Fuento, a herpetologist at the nonprofit League for the Protection of Birds in France, encountered the viperine snake (Natrix maura) at Lac de Carcès in southeastern France. At first he thought the snake was simply trying to eat the fish. But then he realized the snake was struggling.

"The snake showed unusual spasmodic movements in an apparent attempt to expel the fish, which appeared to be lodged in the snake's [esophagus]," he and a colleague wrote in a research note describing the incident, published Sept. 10 in the journal Herpetology Notes.

Related: Watch slime-covered penis mushroom that smells like rotting flesh grow and decay in mesmerizing time-lapse

Fuento got an intern to hold the snake while he tried to remove the fish, but the fish's spines along its back were stuck in the snake's esophagus. So to get it out, he gently pushed the fish into the snake's mouth to dislodge the spines, "as if I were removing a hook from a fish's mouth," he told Live Science in an email.

Once relieved of the fish, the snake did not appear to be injured and slithered away under a rock, he said.

With the fish out of the snake's mouth, Fuento identified it as a ruffe (Gymnocephalus cernua). Ruffes are small freshwater fish native to parts of Europe and Asia, but the species has been introduced to North America and other parts of Europe, including France — and their tough and spiny dorsal fins could make them difficult for some predators to swallow.

Viperine snakes spend most of their time in and around water, eating mostly fish, and their native range overlaps with ruffes in some regions, according to the paper. But the paper also noted that ruffes are an invasive species in Mediterranean wetlands, where viperine snakes are rare and declining.

That decline has been caused by several threats, including river pollution, wetland destruction and urbanization, Fuento told Live Science. His paper noted that the ruffe's introduction could be another potential threat to the local snake population — although the actual impact of the invasive fish on the snakes has not been studied.

The paper points to other instances where fish-eating snakes in Europe, including viperine snakes, have died after eating invasive fish such as largemouth bass (Micropterus salmoides), brown bullheads (Ameiurus nebulosus) and common sunfish (Lepomis gibbosus).

But snakes can also die after mishaps while eating native fish too, the paper noted, and some snakes seem to have the ability to avoid "harmful alien fishes."

"The goal of this article is to quote a new case of mortality by exotic fish," Fuento said. "And we hope that may lead to further research."

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. 

On Aug. 4, hunters in southern Florida will begin a cull of Burmese pythons as part of an annual competition to try and keep the invasive snakes' population in check.

Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) are native to southeast Asia, where they slink through thick jungles, grasslands and swamps. But these snakes — which can grow to be more than 18 feet (5.5 meters) long — have also established an invasive population in southern Florida that has decimated local ecosystems, with the snakes devouring prey as large as deer and alligators.

Researchers aren't sure exactly how the animals gained a foothold in the state, but one theory is that the invasive snakes got their start in 1992 when Hurricane Andrew destroyed a reptile breeding facility near Miami, setting Burmese pythons loose across the Sunshine State. 

But many experts say this is likely an oversimplification of the pythons' origin story.

In 1992, Andrew slammed into the Miami area as a Category 5 storm, quickly becoming one of the most destructive hurricanes in American history. More than 15 feet (4.5 m) of storm surge flooded the coast and over 10 inches (25 centimeters) of rain dropped in some areas, with wind gusts of about 167 mph (269 kph).

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

According to The New Yorker, a warehouse filled with reptiles in Homestead, Florida, just south of Miami, was destroyed during the storm — and one official told the magazine that he remembered seeing hundreds of Burmese pythons in that warehouse. When the storm destroyed the building, those pythons could have gotten loose in the swampy environs of southeast Florida.

Many wild animals did get loose during Andrew's landfall, and some newspapers reported sightings of large snakes in the storm's aftermath. But individual Burmese pythons have reportedly been spotted in the Everglades since at least 1979, with unconfirmed reports throughout the 1980s, according to a 2023 report. 

The snakes were not commonly sighted in southern Florida until at least 1995. While that's three years after Andrew, the timing and geography of the python invasion don't fit with the storm theory, scientists say.

From 1995 to 2000, 11 pythons were sighted or captured in the southwestern part of Everglades National Park — miles away from the destroyed reptile facility in Homestead. "When the population started to grow initially, in the 1990s, most of it was 20 miles [32 km] away from that facility," Dan Simberloff, an ecologist at the University of Tennessee, told Live Science.

It wasn't until after the turn of the millennium that the snakes routinely showed up in the Miami area, near where the warehouse once stood.

Based on this geography and the population's growth rates, a 2011 study concluded that the simplest explanation for the Burmese python invasion is that a few individual snakes were released into the southern Everglades sometime before 1985, with the population growing slowly until the 1990s, before skyrocketing upward. 

The 2023 report noted that a second, separate introduction of Burmese pythons may have occurred in southwest Florida, closer to Naples.

"While some believe Hurricane Andrew in 1992 caused the python problem, Burmese pythons had been detected here prior to that hurricane, as early as 1979. Several introduction events likely occurred in south Florida," a spokesperson for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told Live Science via email.

This doesn't necessarily mean that Hurricane Andrew didn't contribute to the snakes' spread, however — it is possible that some snakes escaped from the pet trade during the storm and joined the feral population, experts said.

"If it was a multiple choice question as to how did Burmese pythons get into the south Florida ecosystem and (A) was 'Escaped Pet,' (B) was 'Intentionally Released,' and (C) was 'Meteorological Disturbances' — I would circle (D): 'All of the Above,'" Ian Bartoszek, an environmental scientist with the Conservancy of Southwest Florida, told Live Science.

Simberloff said that over the past two decades, research has shown that many invasive species that were thought to be a result of a single introduction were actually introduced in their new habitats multiple times. This includes the brown anole (Anolis sagrei), another reptile invasive to Florida.

About 17,000 Burmese pythons were imported to the United States between 1970 and 1995 for the pet trade — and with that many pythons coming in, it's entirely plausible that a few will be released by their owners.

"People can get tired of having a huge snake," Simberloff said.

Bartosek, who kept Burmese pythons as pets growing up in Florida, also noted that the snakes are "escape artists" — and it's possible that some pet snakes could have snuck out of homes and into the warm, prey-filled habitats of southern Florida. It is now mostly illegal to keep the species as a pet in the state.

The population of wild Burmese pythons in Florida is unknown, but estimates suggest there could be hundreds of thousands out there. Last year's Python Challenge saw 231 snakes removed from the Everglades, and while initiatives like this are helpful in controlling the population, eradication is currently out of the question. 

"Eradication of the entire population across the landscape is not possible with any existing tools, whether applied singly or in combination," the 2023 report said.

A young boy in Oklahoma has caught a bizarre, piranha-like fish with eerily human-like teeth hidden behind its fishy lips.

Charlie Clinton caught the exotic fish, known as a pacu, in his "neighborhood pond" on the weekend of July 15, according to a Facebook post from the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation (ODWC). 

Pacu is a name given to several species of fish in the Serrasalmidae family. They are native to South America and are closely related to piranhas, with a similar body shape to their razor-toothed cousins. Pacus enter freshwater ecosystems in the U.S. when people keep them as pets but irresponsibly release them into nearby ponds and rivers when they grow too big for their tanks, ODWC officials wrote.

The exact species of pacu Clinton caught is unknown, but the group is known to grow to around 3.5 feet (1 meter) long and weigh up to 88 pounds (40 kilograms), ODWC officials wrote. 

Related: 'Majestic' 3-ton sunfish sets a new world record for largest bony fish ever discovered

Despite looking like piranhas, pacus are harmless to humans. Their flattened, human-like teeth are likely the result of their varied omnivorous diet, which includes small fish, hard-shelled crustaceans and the fruits and nuts of freshwater plants, according to the American Museum of Natural History (AMHN).

 Pacu poop also helps to fertilize freshwater plants and disperse their seeds, which makes them a keystone species in their native ecosystems, according to AMNH. However, like most other invasive species, pacus can have a negative impact on ecosystems they are introduced to.

"The practice of dumping unwanted pets in waterways can be incredibly harmful to native wildlife," ODWC representatives wrote in the Facebook post. "They are an exotic, invasive species that can cause damage to our local ecosystems." As a result, anglers are urged to remove them from rivers and ponds where possible, they added.

In 2018, Kennedy Smith, who was 11 at the time, caught a pacu in an Oklahoma lake that weighed around 1 pound (0.5 kg). It bit her grandmother's finger as they tried to remove it from the hook, although the human-like gnashers did little damage, USA Today reported at the time.

"I was confused because I knew that fish with teeth are not normal," Smith told USA Today. "It was weird. They were human-like and that made it even weirder."

Pacus are not the only fish with human-like teeth that appear in U.S. waters. In 2021, a sheepshead fish (Archosargus probatocephalus) with a much larger set of pearly whites was caught from a pier on the North Carolina coastline.  

A huge Burmese python has been caught in Florida with a clutch of 60 eggs that were "just days from being laid." 

Hunter Mike Kimmel captured and killed the 16-foot-long (5 meters) snake in the Everglades, where the invasive species has been wreaking havoc on local ecosystems for decades. 

"A python this size can eat anything in the Everglades, as I've proven with the multiple adult alligators I've rescued from being eaten by pythons (3 separate times)." Kimmel wrote in an Instagram post after the catch.

Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) are native to Southeast Asia, where they are considered endangered in many regions as a result of hunting and habitat loss. They were introduced to Florida's Everglades via the exotic pet trade and quickly gained a foothold throughout the 1980s and 1990s, feasting on native populations such as rabbits, opossums, bobcats and even alligators.

Related: Burmese pythons are helping rats take over Florida's Everglades — and that could help spread disease

Limiting the spread of Burmese pythons is a key goal of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, and it is legal for people to hunt and kill them humanely. It is unclear how many of these snakes now live in the Everglades, but the population is thought to number in the tens of thousands. Since 2000, over 17,000 have been removed from the wild.

One of the reasons the population is difficult to control is the number of offspring they produce. Burmese pythons mate in spring, with each sexually mature female laying up to 100 eggs about three months after mating. After the eggs are laid, the female coils around them to incubate them for six to eight weeks, until they are ready to hatch. A study published 2016 found the number of Burmese python eggs that go on to successfully hatch was 77%.

In 2022, researchers caught the biggest Burmese python ever found in the Everglades — an 18-foot-long (5.5 m) behemoth weighing 215 pounds (98 kilograms). It carried 122 egg follicles — spherical structures that mature into eggs after fertilization. 

And in April this year, a team led by the U.S. Geological Survey caught a python that had laid 96 eggs in one go — setting a new record for Florida, New Scientist reported. 

The content of a small box on his roof terrace in central London has taught ecologist Tim Blackburn more about the natural world than he ever thought possible. Every night, the light-mounted trap attracts winged creatures that perhaps don't get the best publicity — despite making up roughly a ninth of all known animal species on Earth.

Blackburn's new book, "The Jewel Box" (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2023) unveils the hidden world of moths, as well as the laws of nature that govern them and all the other creatures on this planet. Inspired by the diversity and beauty of the insects that fall into the eponymous "jewel box" at night, Blackburn, a professor of invasion biology at University College London in the U.K., reflects on 30 years of work as a scientist, taking readers on a journey around the wide web of life.

Shortly after the book's publication on June 8, Blackburn told Live Science about what five years of moth trapping have taught him.

Related: What's the difference between a moth and a butterfly?

Q: Thank you so much for joining me to talk about moths, Tim. Let's start with what first drew you to these insects, because in the introduction to "The Jewel Box," you write that your lifelong obsession is actually birds. What kindled your love for moths?

Blackburn: It was a bit of an accident, really. Ever since I was little, I've been into birds. My mother says before I could talk I would sit in the pram pointing at birds as they flew past. I got into moths partly because I was a bit nature-deprived and didn't really have time to go off looking for birds. Simultaneously, I started to run an undergraduate field course to a place in Scotland where they had a moth trap. It's basically just a box with a light on the top. Moths are attracted to the light and fall into the box. I was just so completely blown away that first morning when I went out to see what that moth trap had conjured out of thin air. The obsession started there. 

I started to run a moth trap in London — and again, it conjured up all these incredible creatures out of nowhere. I just got completely hooked. The last five years, I've been obsessively running a moth trap wherever and whenever I can.

Q: It must have been magical to discover that there is such a diversity and abundance of moths in central London — many people wouldn't expect that. When you opened your trap for the first time, was there a moth that particularly struck you?

Blackburn: One that really sticks in the memory is a thing called a tree-lichen beauty [Cryphia algae], which is about the size of my thumbnail. It has a jade cloak, its thorax is often quite bright green, and the wings have this lovely mottled, lichen-like green camouflage. It's a really beautiful little moth that until about 30 years ago was really rare in the U.K. There were literally three records of this moth before 1990 in the U.K., and I had a dozen of them on my roof terrace that first morning.  

Q: You've been running the moth trap on your roof terrace for quite some time now. As an ecologist with plenty of experience in the field, have you learned anything surprising in five years of moth trapping?

Blackburn: Every day is a school day. I was constantly surprised by things I was catching that I had no idea were there. There are so many alien moths in the environment — species from Asia, Australia, New Zealand and southern Europe — all occurring together in London, because people have moved them there by accident.

There can be big problems when we introduce a species from one part of the world to somewhere that it has no evolutionary history of association with. The box-tree moth [Cydalima perspectalis] is a classic alien species that we have in the U.K. It was introduced from East Asia and it chews people's box [Buxus sempervirens] hedges down. In the U.K. and through a lot of Europe, we also have natural box woodland and forests, and the moths are really hitting those very hard — killing a lot of trees.

Q: The book is obviously heavily inspired by your moth trap, but that's not all you focus on, and it's packed with stories and anecdotes. What was your aim in writing it?

Blackburn: What I really wanted to write about was how scientists try to understand the natural world, but in a way that was accessible to the general reader. The book really tries to explain the ecological rules of nature — how life organizes itself to produce the diversity of organisms that we see around us in nature… I always say it's not a book about moths, but it's a book illuminated by moths. 

Q: Humans have transformed the natural world, and those ecological rules are shifting. What challenges do moths face in this changing environment?

Blackburn: Not only do we switch natural vegetation to crops, which takes away habitat from species, but we then spray those crops with pesticides to stop insects from eating them. Those pesticides spread across the environment, which has a big impact on insects and moths. 

For moths, there's the additional issue of light pollution, because they're nocturnal. Having light in the environment 24 hours a day disrupts developmental processes and feeding. We're also seeing large-scale shifts in the distribution of species as they track changes in the climate. Species living in cooler environments or at higher elevations are getting squeezed out as we push temperatures beyond the limits that organisms can cope with.

Q: Do moths play an important ecological role?

Blackburn: Moths are fantastic pollinators, and we've only discovered this recently because we're not nocturnal. When the sun goes down, the pollinator shift changes and the moths take over from bees and hoverflies. Moths pollinate a wider range of species than bees, and they're more efficient pollinators. 

Essentially, moths sit squarely in the middle of the web of life on Earth: They pollinate plants and consume plants, and they're consumed by birds, mammals, bats, spiders, parasitoid wasps — all sorts of things. When you think that 1 in 9 species of animal that we know is a moth, it's kind of remarkable. They really hold together our natural system.

Q: In the introduction to the book, you write that you are "obsessive" about identifying moths. Why is it so important to name species?

Blackburn: One of the stories I tell towards the end of the book is about a species of moth that was only described in 2017. I catch it on my terrace, and it's quite an unprepossessing little thing. But for years, people thought it was a thing called the peach twig borer [Anarsia lineatella] that is considered a pest, because it bores into fruit like peaches and apricots. 

When some of these moths appeared in Denmark, in an area where they grow a lot of soft fruit, growers were really concerned and considering large-scale pesticide applications to try and stop this species in its tracks. It turns out that two species had been lumped together and the one that colonized Denmark actually feeds on maple rather than fruit trees. They were going to spray all these crops with pesticides to deal with a problem that wasn't a problem at all. If you don't know what you're dealing with, it can lead to fundamental mistakes in how you respond to species.

Q: What do you wish more people knew about moths?

Blackburn: People think that they're little brown things that hide away at night and aren't really that exciting. Some of them eat your cardigans and carpets, so that doesn't go down well. Because we don't see them, we don't realize this incredible diversity and how beautiful they are. When you start running a moth trap, there's these bright red creatures and bright greens and yellows, candy pink and gold. Some of them have the wingspan of a small bird. They are absolutely gorgeous, and that's where the title "The Jewel Box" comes from: They're these incredible insect jewels, and people should get to know them and love them.

Thirty years after Pablo Escobar's death in 1993, the notorious cartel leader's "cocaine hippos" are still wreaking havoc in one of the world's most biodiverse countries. 

A new study of the invasive mammals' population in Colombia revealed there could be double the number experts previously estimated, Nature reported. A study in 2021 estimated that there were around 98 individuals, but the more recent census, published in April,  puts the population at between 181 and 215. 

These hippos are descended from just four adults that were illegally imported by Escobar in 1991 from Africa to his private zoo at Hacienda Nápoles. Although many of the zoo's other exotic animals — such as giraffes and zebras — were transferred to sanctuaries after Escobar's death, the three female hippos and the one male remained in place due to the challenges of removing them. However, they escaped the abandoned estate and have been living, and rapidly reproducing, in the Magdalena River system ever since. 

Researchers calculated the revised population estimate after conducting surveys in 2021 and 2022. As well as counting hippos in person, they used drones to spot hippos in difficult-to-reach locations, as well as other tracking methods such as using footprints. 

Related: Burmese pythons are helping rats take over Florida's Everglades — and that could help spread disease

Although popular with tourists and some locals, Colombia’s hippos (Hippopotamus amphibius) are an invasive species and pose a multitude of problems. Hippos are ecosystem engineers, so they are drastically changing the ecosystem around them by eating vast quantities of vegetation and filling the Magdalena River system with excrement. While excrement provides a natural source of fertilizer and nutrients for aquatic life, too much of it can have an adverse effect. A 2018 study in the journal Biological Conservation compared pools in central Tanzania that had high and low densities of hippos, and found that the former had lower oxygen content and lower diversities of invertebrates and fishes because of  the high levels of excrement.

Hippos are also dangerous and kill around 500 people every year in Africa. They are territorial, aggressive, fast — both on land and in water — and very strong. There have been at least two hippo attacks on people in Colombia since 2019. 

The Colombian government has grappled with its hippo problem for a number of years. Although culling them might seem like a solution and is endorsed by some conservationists, according to Nature, there was an outcry when a dead hippo was photographed alongside a group of posing soldiers, which put paid to plans for future culls, according to the Guardian. 

Wildlife officials have attempted to administer contraceptives to female hippos via darts and sterilise males, but these initiatives are proving costly and challenging. A study published in April 2023 in the journal Scientific Reports looked at contraceptives and found that it would cost between $1 million to $2 million to "sufficiently decrease hippo population growth to achieve long-term removal." However, this was based on a hippo population of 91 individuals, so this is potentially a huge underestimate of the costs. 

According to the Guardian, plans have been underway to transfer 70 of the hippos to sanctuaries abroad, in northern Mexico and in India, which could cost $3.5 million. But this would still leave between 111 and 145 hippos roaming the river system, the new population estimate suggests. 

Burmese pythons are inadvertently helping rats dominate parts of the Everglades in Florida by wiping out their traditional predators, researchers have found. The rise in rodents could further disrupt an already fragile ecosystem and increase the risk of disease to humans. 

The first Burmese python (Python bivittatus) was found in Everglades National Park in 1979, and numbers skyrocketed throughout the 1980s and 1990s. There are now tens of thousands of the snakes living in the Everglades, and over the last 40 years they have decimated native populations, including bobcats, rabbits and foxes. 

But some smaller mammals appear unaffected by the presence of Burmese pythons, including the cotton rat (Sigmodon hispidus). To find out what impact pythons are having on this species, researchers caught 115 rats and fitted them with transmitters — 34 were in an area known to have a low population of pythons, while 81 were in an area with a high python population. 

They tracked the rats every 48 hours, and recorded the predator involved when any were found dead. In cases where the corpses had likely been swallowed, the team analyzed scat and regurgitated remains for rat DNA. 

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

The team’s findings, published May 17 in the Journal of Mammalogy, showed that rat death rates were similar in both areas. Though pythons killed six of the tagged cotton rats in the high python population area, they did not have a significant impact on the overall rat population.

But because pythons have had a devastating effect on the populations of other, larger mammals, such as bobcats and foxes, this has left an ecosystem opening for the rats to take over.

As a result, in areas where pythons are pervasive, cotton rats "now dominate the community," study author Robert A McCleery, an associate professor of wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida, told Live Science in an email. 

The collapse of large and medium-sized mammal populations in the Everglades has impacted important ecosystem processes, such as nutrient cycling and scavenging. Rabbits, for example, acted as a keystone species for seed dispersal. 

Rats, the authors said, are unlikely to be able to fulfill the roles that the lost mammals played. 

Their dominance also has the potential to spread diseases to people. Cotton rats are reservoirs for viruses that can pass to humans, including the Everglades virus (EVEV) and hantaviruses. And in a 2017 study in Biology Letters, researchers found that in the absence of other mammals, mosquitoes in some parts of the Everglades are now mainly feasting on cotton rats. Diseases carried by the rats can then be passed through mosquito bites to humans. 

The study focused on a species of mosquito — Culex cedecei  — that tends to stay away from urban areas, but another species, Culex panocossa, has also been found in Florida — and this species survives in cities. 

Nathan Burkett-Cadena, the study’s lead author and associate professor of entomology at the University of Florida,  said C. panocossa has now come into contact with cotton rats, and this could lead to "increased risk of arbovirus [viruses spread by insect vectors] infection for people living in south Florida," he told Live Science. EVEV is one of these viruses, symptoms for which include fever, severe headache, muscle pain and in rare cases, brain swelling. 

An invasive mosquito species from Central and South America has taken root in South Florida, raising concerns that the pests might spread dangerous viruses, like West Nile.

The mosquito species, called Culex lactator, was first detected in Florida in 2018 by researchers affiliated with the University of Florida's Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS). The researchers reported their findings in a new study, published Wednesday (March 22) in the Journal of Medical Entomology.

The UF/IFAS team ran a DNA analysis on the mosquitoes to determine their species. After the researchers initially found C. lactator in Miami-Dade County, other scientists uncovered additional populations in nearby Collier and Lee counties. 

The mosquitoes, which physically resemble many others in Florida, may have already seeded populations in additional counties, study lead author Lawrence Reeves, a mosquito biologist at the UF/IFAS research center in Vero Beach, said in a statement. It's likely that the pest will continue to spread to more locations in the state.

Related: Should we kill every mosquito on Earth? 

"Introductions of new mosquito species like this are concerning because many of our greatest mosquito-related challenges" — namely, the bug's ability to spread disease — "are the result of nonnative mosquitoes," Reeves said. "And in a case like this, it's difficult to anticipate what to expect when we know so little about a mosquito species."

C. lactator belongs to the genus Culex, other members of which are known to transmit dangerous pathogens, such as the West Nile and St. Louis encephalitis viruses. For now, though, scientists don't know whether C. lactator can also spread the diseases. 

"It's too early to know whether Culex lactator will exacerbate these challenges, but the implications are often difficult to predict because not all mosquito species are equally capable of transmitting a particular virus or other pathogen," Reeves said.

At least 17 nonnative mosquito species have established populations in Florida — 11 within the past 20 years, and six within the last five. Climate change could exacerbate the spread of new mosquitoes to Florida from the tropics, by making the state's environment more hospitable to the pests and increasing the frequency of storms that could carry the invasive species over in the first place, according to the UF/IFAS statement.

Since spotting the C. lactator in Florida, researchers have found specimens carrying the blood of warbler birds, Reeves told The Tampa Bay Times. "That's probably something that we don't want to see," he said. "Public health-wise, the viruses that we're most worried about — that this mosquito would serve as a vector for — are really viruses of birds." 

For example, mosquitoes pick up both West Nile virus and St. Louis encephalitis virus by feeding on infected birds and can then spread the pathogens to people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (There's no evidence of birds spreading the viruses directly to humans.) 

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.

It's no secret that invasive rats can cause widespread and long-lasting damage to tropical island ecosystems, but now, a new finding reveals that the invasive rodents' impacts may extend even further than the land on which they scamper; these ravenous critters can also disrupt the surrounding marine ecosystem. 

In the Indian Ocean, invasive island rats have altered the behavior of tiny farming fish known as jewel damselfish (Microspathodon chrysurus) that live on coral reefs located miles offshore, a new study shows. Affected damselfish have become much more docile than normal due to a weird link between the fish and the rats: bird poop. 

Jewel damselfish are normally highly territorial fish that aggressively defend and cultivate small patches of algae that grow on corals surrounding tropical islands. The plant patches are greatly desired by the damselfish because the algae are highly nutritious, thanks largely to the nutrients that run off from the islands. One main source of island-derived nutrients is the poop, or guano, excreted by seabirds that nest on the islands, which then gets washed into the ocean. 

However, invasive rats, which were historically introduced to islands after stowing away on ships, are known to decimate bird populations on their new homes by sneaking into nests and feeding on unhatched eggs. This can cause seabird densities to decrease by up to 720 times on rat-infested islands, which can decrease the nutrients in surrounding waters by up to 251 times, the study authors explained in a statement. As a result, the damselfish's algal patches have become less nutritious, which means the feisty farmers are less inclined to defend them.

Related: Glowing, red-eyed rat fetus is global photo contest's gorgeously creepy winner

In the new study, published Jan. 5 in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, researchers compared the damselfish behavior on coral reefs surrounding five rat-free islands and five rat-infested islands in a remote archipelago in the Indian Ocean. 

The team found that damselfish surrounding rat-infested islands had larger territories, measuring an average of 6.7 square feet (0.62 square meter), compared with an average of 5.2 square feet (0.48 square meter) on rat-free islands. The larger territories are a sign that the fish have become less territorial over specific patches, the researchers said.

The team also observed that the fish were up to five times less likely to act aggressively toward one another.

Jewel damselfish around rat-free islands fiercely defend their patch of algal turf because it is packed with  nutrition, which means the fish get "more for their money," by using energy to defend it, said study co-author Rachel Gunn, a behavioral ecologist at Tübingen University in Germany and a former doctoral student at Lancaster University in the U.K. at the time of the study. "We believe that the presence of rats is lowering the nutritional benefit of the turf to the extent that it is almost not worth fighting for, which is what we are observing with these behavior changes." 

The researchers think the change in the damselfish's behavior is likely to have further knock-on effects on their coral reef ecosystems, which have not yet been properly studied.

"The algal farming of damselfish affects the balance of corals and algae on the reef," Gunn said. "Their aggression towards other fish can [also] influence the way those fish move around and use the reef."

The decrease in the available nutrients in the water could also have implications for other algae eaters, as well as for filter-feeding organisms such as sponges, which could, in turn, affect food chains across the reefs, the researchers warned. "Ecosystems evolve a delicate balance over long time scales, so any disruption could have knock-on consequences for the wider ecosystem," Gunn said.

The team believes the new findings show how important it is to control or completely kill off invasive rat populations where possible.

"Rat eradication has the potential to have multiple, cross-ecosystem benefits," Gunn said. The removal of rats from tropical islands would likely restore the territorial behavior of jewel damselfish and provide other benefits to the rest of the coral reef ecosystem, she added.

A British angler has caught one of the world's largest goldfish on record after an epic battle with the fish in a French lake. 

The fisher landed the 67-pound (30 kilograms) fish, nicknamed The Carrot, after a 25-minute tug-of-war at Bluewater Lakes in France's northeast Champagne province. A hybrid between a leather carp and koi, the goldfish was released into the lake 20 years ago, after which it ballooned in size, becoming one of the largest of its kind to ever be caught.

"With normal fish you struggle to see them if they're just under the surface, but The Carrot is obviously bright orange so you can't miss it," Andy Hackett, the man who caught the fish, told the BBC. "It's a much sought-after fish, not many people have caught it, it's quite elusive."

After catching The Carrot, Hackett released the fish back into the lake so that other anglers would have a chance to catch it, the BBC reported.

Related: Do goldfish really have a 3-second memory?

If they are kept in home aquariums, goldfish (Carassius auratus) and smaller carp tend to grow no larger than 2 inches (5 centimeters) long. But when released into the wild, the teensy fish can grow into giants; in 2013, one supersize goldfish captured in Lake Tahoe measured nearly 1.5 feet (46 cm) long and weighed over 4 pounds (2 kg).

Upon announcing the day's catch, Hackett was told "You're gonna need a bigger bowl," he recalled.

Despite their propensity to die in captivity, goldfish are as tough as they come in the wild — having proven capable of living 25 years and surviving for up to five months without any oxygen. This is because the fish evolved to live in ponds that freeze over in the winter, meaning that in low-oxygen environments their bodies shift from aerobic respiration to converting carbohydrates into alcohol, which they release through their gills. When these traits are coupled with rapid reproductive rates, goldfish are quickly able to dominate new habitats at the cost of native species.

Goldfish tenacity has already caused problems in lakes in which multiple fish, often dumped by people who once kept them as pets, are released at once. In 2021, officials in the Minnesota city of Burnsville released an official statement pleading with residents to refrain from releasing goldfish into the waters of the city's Lake Keller. The once-tiny fish had begun growing to enormous sizes, and were wreaking havoc on the lake's delicate ecological webs.

"Please don't release your pet goldfish into ponds and lakes!" city officials said in a statement on Twitter. "They grow bigger than you think and contribute to poor water quality by mucking up the bottom sediments and uprooting plants."

Waterway managers in Minnesota's nearby Carver County removed about 50,000 goldfish from local waters in November 2020, according to the Washington Post. Similar problems have also cropped up in the province of Alberta, Canada and the city of Spokane, Washington, where the local government has pledged $150,000 to liberate a local lake from a goldfish invasion, KHQ news reported.

A team of veterinary pathologists recently extracted a 5-foot-long (1.5 meters) alligator corpse from the body of an 18-foot (5.5 m) Burmese python that was euthanized in Florida. The necropsy, or animal autopsy, was captured in a jaw-dropping video and recently went viral on Instagram.

The chunky python was the same length as Florida's largest-ever Burmese python (Python bivittatus), which was caught and killed in June. That individual weighed around 215 pounds (97 kilograms), but the newly-dissected python was likely even heavier at the time of death, considering its massive final meal.

A group of biologists discovered the alligator-stuffed snake in Everglades National Park. The scientists were surveying invasive plant species when they came across the enormous serpent, which is also invasive to Florida. The researchers swiftly euthanized the snake in accordance with local wildlife guidelines and sent it to a Florida-based laboratory for a necropsy. (As Burmese pythons are an invasive species and threaten local wildlife, people may capture or kill them humanely year-round in certain parts of south Florida without requiring a hunting permit or license to do so, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.)

Rosie Moore, a Florida-based geoscientist who also studies invasive herpetofauna — reptiles and amphibians — and was part of the necropsy team, posted a video of the gory operation on her Instagram account on Nov. 1. In the video, the pathologists cut open the snake's skin and then its stomach before sliding the dead gator out of its slimy pink tomb. At the time of publication, the video has been viewed more than 16.8 million times and had around 395,000 likes.

Related: Watch a python swallow an impala whole in this jaw-dropping video 

"When it arrived at the lab, it was apparent that there was an alligator inside the python," Moore told Live Science in an email. The team removed the gator from inside the snake so they could measure it, she added. 

The swallowed gator was in such good condition that it looked like it could have stood up and walked out of the room, which surprised the researchers who freed it. "The python had begun to digest the gator, but for the most part, the gator was fully intact," Moore said. The only visible damage was done to the dermal layer, or scales, she added.

This is not the first time that a Burmese python has swallowed an alligator whole, but it is unclear how common that is, Moore said. "While reports have been growing of python-gator predation and vice versa, I would not precisely characterize it as a common occurrence." Typically, the enormous snakes prefer to target other types of reptiles, as well as birds, rodents and other small mammals, she added.

It is commonly and falsely assumed that pythons and other large snakes, like anacondas, are able to swallow massive prey — such as alligators, deer and even humans — by dislocating their jaws. But in reality, snakes' jaws do not dislocate. Instead, their upper and lower jaws are connected by a super-stretchy piece of elastic tissue that gives them "a great deal of mobility," Moore said. 

In August, a new study tested how wide Burmese pythons' gape can reach and revealed that the largest individuals, like this one, could potentially stretch their jaws up to 30 inches (76 centimeters) wide. 

Burmese pythons were introduced in Florida in the early 1970s when pet owners illegally released them into the wild, Moore said. The hardy serpents have since "exploded" in numbers and caused widespread damage to animal populations in Everglades National Park, she added. Since the python's arrival, up to 99.3% of raccoons, 98.9 % of opossums and up to 87.5% of bobcats have been wiped out in the park's southernmost regions, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

"Due to these impacts, it is highly encouraged that Burmese pythons are euthanized on sight," Moore said.

Under the cover of darkness, two wildlife officials raided an invasive python's nest in a South Florida swamp and successfully wrestled 19 wriggling hatchlings and their mother into a bag and out of the protected habitat. The next day, one of the officials captured a second breeding female — measuring an astounding 17.5 feet (5.3 meters) long — from the exact same spot.

Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) were first introduced to Florida in the 1970s and have since established large breeding populations in southern regions of the state. The humongous snakes usually grow to be about 6 to 9 feet (1.8 to 2.7 m) long, although recently, officials captured a nearly 18 foot (5.4 m) long python near Naples that weighed 215 pounds (97 kilograms), Live Science previously reported. With few natural predators in Florida, the invasive snakes pose a threat to many native birds, mammals and even alligators, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC).

For this reason, the FWC and other organizations use a number of strategies to find, capture and remove pythons from South Florida ecosystems; this includes hiring contractors to survey snake-infested swampland and capture any pythons they find.

Alex McDuffie is one such contractor, hired by the South Florida Water Management District. Just before midnight on Monday (July 11), McDuffie spotted a newly-hatched Burmese python youngster in the Big Cypress National Preserve, a 729,000-acre (2,950 square km) freshwater swamp ecosystem located in Ochopee, Florida, north of Everglades National Park. While tracking the snake, he ran into FWC Officer Matthew Rubenstein, who was patrolling the park and promptly joined the snake hunt, according to a statement from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

Related: Watch a python swallow an impala whole in this jaw-dropping video 

The two soon discovered a Burmese python nursery, where a large female sat coiled upon 23 unhatched eggs and 18 python hatchlings. Another python nest lay nearby, they noted, and when McDuffie returned to the site the next day, he found a second breeding female and removed it from the habitat.  

"The pythons and unhatched eggs were removed from the sensitive habitat, helping to prevent future negative impacts to our native wildlife," the FWC announced in a Facebook post shared July 14. "Great job, Officer Rubenstein and Alex!" 

In the Facebook post, the FWC also included a reminder about the upcoming Florida Python Challenge, an annual 10-day python removal competition that will run from August 5 to 14 this year. Participants can register as novices or professionals, with professionals being experienced people who are paid to remove pythons from the Everglades. In both categories, participants can win cash prizes for capturing the most or longest pythons, and additional awards will be provided for veterans and active members of the armed services. 

More than 600 people took part in last year's Python Challenge, and collectively, they removed 223 Burmese pythons from the Everglades, according to the FWC. 

Originally published on Live Science. 

The days of invasive crazy ants — whose supercolonies can support millions upon millions of the fierce insects — may be numbered. That's because a deadly fungus that uses spring-loaded harpoonlike barbs to pierce the ants' gut cells is wiping out their colonies across the Southeastern United States.  

That's not a bad thing. Tawny crazy ants (Nylanderia fulva), which are originally from South America, have over the past two decades become an increasingly problematic pest species and a threat to local wildlife in the U.S., by creating vast supercolonies. 

Scientists with the University of Texas at Austin's (UTA) Brackenridge Field Laboratory recently identified a type of fungus that seemingly only targets tawny crazy ants, sparing native ant species and other arthropods. One ant colony infected with the fungus can spread the pathogen to others that are nearby, leading to the collapse of a supercolony and triggering the extinction of a crazy ant population within just a few years, the researchers reported in a new study.

In South America, tawny crazy ant nests are self-contained and the insects will battle ferociously with neighboring crazy ant colonies. But North America's invasive crazy ants follow a different strategy, in which new nests emerge out of an existing one — a process known as budding — and all the colonies' ants in a given area recognize each other as close relatives and move freely between nests, said Edward LeBrun, lead author of the new study and a research scientist in UTA's Department of Integrative Biology.

These nests "spread like bacterial plaque across a landscape," LeBrun told Live Science. "Every meter there's a nest, and that's over many square kilometers. How many ants are there? Many, many, many millions," LeBrun said.

Related: Murder hornets and monkey cannibals: 10 times nature freaked us out

Because crazy ants multiply quickly, they can swiftly become so numerous that they overwhelm local insects, arthropods, and small mammals and reptiles. They also swarm in human homes, multiplying by the thousands in basements, crawlspaces and walls, and even inside electronics, Live Science previously reported. But while forming supercolonies may have previously benefited crazy ants, living in a network of linked nests could prove to be their downfall by aiding the spread of a lethal pathogen, scientists reported March 28 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In 2015, LeBrun and his colleagues described a previously unknown microsporidian — a type of fungus — in tawny crazy ants that had been sent from Florida to their Texas laboratory. The ants had enlarged abdomens that were stuffed with white, fatty tissue, which happens when a microsporidia infection turns an ant into a spore factory, LeBrun explained. When the researchers checked Gulf Coast tawny crazy ant colonies, they found the fungus in local ants, too; they named the pathogen Myrmecomorba nylanderiae, taking the species name from the host ant.

M. nylanderiae spores are cylindrical capsules containing a tightly coiled filament tipped with a harpoonlike barb at one end. After a spore is swallowed by an ant, a chemical trigger in the insect's gut signals the spore to release the projectile within. 

"If it happens to be close to the gut epithelium [a thin type of animal tissue], it'll puncture the cell wall of its host and then it injects the entire contents of the spore cell into the host cell," LeBrun said. The spore then hijacks the host cell's machinery to replicate itself, creating more spores and jumping into more cells, much as a virus replicates in a host, he explained. 

Inoculating an infestation

For nine years, the researchers observed and sampled 15 infected and uninfected crazy ant colonies, discovering that all of the infected populations declined over time, and more than 60% of them disappeared completely within four to seven years of acquiring the pathogen. The scientists then tested the effects of the fungus by sending infected ants into uninfected crazy ant nests in Estero Llano Grande State Park in Weslaco, Texas. Within two years after introducing the pathogen, the park's previously "apocalyptic" crazy ant infestation had dwindled away into nothing.

The fungus did its lethal work by shortening the life spans of infected workers by about 23%, slashing a colony's workforce, LeBrun said. Workers would also transmit the infection to developing larvae, reducing the number of young that would develop into workers and ensuring that the next generation of workers would also be short-lived. Tawny crazy ant queens take a break from laying eggs during the winter, and don't resume egg laying until spring; in infected colonies, with every new egg-producing season there would be fewer new workers to care for the brood after the older workers died off. Over time, this would guarantee the colony's decline and eventual demise, according to the study.

Scientists don't yet know where the fungus came from — if it originated with crazy ants in South America, or if the ants first encountered it in the U.S. — but it doesn't seem to affect arthropods that are native to the Gulf Coast. This means that the fungus could be used to eradicate invading crazy ants and enable local species to safely return to the ecosystems where they once lived. But because the process of inoculating and tracking infection in a crazy ant colony is labor-intensive and technically challenging, it may be some time before this method is available as an off-the-shelf crazy ant solution for homeowners, Lebrun told Live Science.

"Its application is most likely going to be around areas of high conservation value or where there are endangered species, like state parks or national parks," he said.

Originally published on Live Science.

An invasive spider in the U.K. snagged two bats in its web, and only one bat survived the grisly encounter, thanks to the help of a local resident who freed the entangled creature before it met its doom.

The noble false widow spider (Steatoda nobilis) originally hails from the Madeira archipelago and Canary Islands in the North Atlantic Ocean, but the species is now found in other parts of Europe, as well as in Asia and the Americas. The black widow look-alike reached southern England in 1879 and has since spread toward Scotland and into Wales and Ireland, according to a statement. 

Prior to a new case report, published Feb. 21 in the journal Ecosphere, no spider in the Steatoda genus had ever been observed preying on bats — or any mammal, for that matter. But last July, Ben Waddams, a wildlife artist based in Shropshire, England, snapped photos of several bats trapped in a S. nobilis web at his home. 

Related: Ewwww! Photos of bat-eating spiders 

He shared the snapshots on social media, where they soon drew the attention of researchers at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway, Michel Dugon, head of the Venom Systems Lab at NUI Galway and senior author of the study, said in a video. "We actually understood very quickly that this was a first," Dugon said.

"We knew immediately the significance of Ben's discovery and contacted him to collaborate on documenting this in the scientific literature, as this furthers our understanding of this species capabilities as an invasive species," first author John Dunbar, an Irish Research Council postdoctoral fellow in the Venom Systems Lab, told Live Science in an email. 

Based on Waddams' photos, the team identified the spider as a mature female S. nobilis. The bats that fell victim to the spider's trap belonged to a colony living in Waddams' attic, according to the report. The spider had constructed its web directly beneath the entrance to the bat colony's roost, in an area spattered with bat droppings.

In July 2021, Waddams noticed a dead bat pup suspended in this opportunistically placed web, its wings tightly pinned against its silk-wrapped body. The posterior end of the young bat appeared purple and shriveled, suggesting that the spider had been feeding on the animal, the researchers observed. 

The venom of S. nobilis is a potent neurotoxin that carries some of the same toxins as the venom of true black widows (Latrodectus); past research found that the spiders use this venom to immobilize and feed on small vertebrates, including lizards, the authors noted in their report. 

"False widow spiders, just as their close relatives black widow spiders, have extraordinary prey capture techniques and remarkably potent venom, which allows them to capture small vertebrate prey many times larger than the spider itself with surprising ease," study co-author Aiste Vitkauskaite, a researcher at the Venom Systems Lab, said in the statement. 

"In addition to delivering a bite that injects potent neurotoxic venom, the noble false widow can use other strategies to assist in subduing prey," such as slinging sticky silk at them, Dunbar told Live Science in an email. And for large prey, "the spider will attach additional pre-tensioned threads to the prey which allows the spider to effectively hoist the prey off the ground," to keep it out of reach of pests and parasites, he said. 

The remains of the baby bat's body fell to the ground by the next day, but at that time, an adult bat had become trapped in the same web, Waddams noticed. In this case, the bat was still alive and not yet swaddled in silk when he observed the animal, so he scooped the bat from the web and placed it on the adjacent wall. The rescued animal then crawled back up toward its roost. 

The researchers identified the bats as either common pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pipistrellus) or soprano pipistrelles (Pipistrellus pygmaeus), which are two small, superficially indistinguishable bat species found in Britain. 

Pipistrelle bats are protected under the Wildlife and Countryside Act and the Conservation of Habitats and Species Regulations, according to the statement. This means that people can incur fines or prison time if they capture, injure or kill the bats, or if they damage or obstruct access to their breeding or resting places, for instance, according to Natural England and Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs.

"This study presents yet another example of the invasive impact by the noble false widow spider on native species," Dunbar said in the statement. In a previous study, published in 2018 in the journal Biology and Environment: Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, the team reported that the spider also preys on the viviparous lizard (Zootoca vivipara), a protected species in Ireland.  

"We know they are much more competitive than native spiders, and this further confirms their impact on prey species," Dunbar said.

Species of bat-eating spiders have been identified on every continent except Antarctica, and the arachnids typically prey on small or juvenile insect-eating bats that are unfortunate enough to get snagged in their webs, Live Science previously reported. Now, S. nobilis joins the list of spiders that pose a threat to the fuzzy, flying mammals.   

Editor's note: This article was updated on March 7, 2021 with additional quotes from John Dunbar. The original story was posted on March 3. 

Originally published on Live Science. 

Imagine looking up at a sky so full of birds, they block out light from the sun. Passenger pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius) used to fly in flocks of hundreds of millions, maybe even billions, of birds that took hours to pass overhead. Then, we started shooting them.

Humans began commercially hunting passenger pigeons in the 19th century, and by 1914, they were extinct, according to Audubon magazine. These birds are a prime example of how quickly and efficiently humans can wipe out even the most common species. But is it just us, or can nonhuman animals drive other animals to extinction? 

Sort of, but humans are usually involved. Some animals are capable of interspecies decimation if humans put them in the wrong place and they become invasive — species that cause ecological or economic damage to their non-native environment. For example, Burmese pythons (Python bivittatus) from Asia are gobbling up anything that moves in the Florida Everglades. The python population started out as released and escaped pets, according to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Species that can't recognize or appropriately respond to a new species in their environment are called "naive," or said to suffer from ecological naïveté. It's not their fault; animals don't evolve to flee or defend themselves against aliens lickety-split, and adaptations don't spring up overnight.

"The primary way that alien species wipe out natives is through consumption — so, predators introduced to areas where there have been no predators before, or the types of predators that were there were different," Tim Blackburn, a professor of invasion biology at University College London in the U.K., told Live Science. "That gives them a sort of inbuilt advantage that allows them to eat their way through naive faunas [animals of a particular region]." 

Related: What's the biggest group of animals ever recorded on Earth?

Blackburn's go-to invasive-species example is the domestic cat. "They have contributed to the extinction of dozens of species of bird," he said — the Stephens Island wren (Traversia lyalli) in New Zealand, which went extinct in 1895, is one example. Cats are the leading direct human cause of bird mortality in the U.S. and Canada, according to the American Bird Conservancy. In other words, American birds are under greater threat from pet cats than from guns.

Humans are responsible for moving feline hunters and giant snakes around the planet. Anything they do after that is on us. But what about when animals naturally migrate to a new area? According to Blackburn, animals tend to naturally disperse to nearby areas, where the kinds of species are generally similar and, therefore, respond appropriately to one another — so there are usually no unfair matchups. 

Occasionally, the movement of land forces an interspecies shake-up. The Great American Biotic Interchange (about 10 million to 10,000 years ago) is a prominent example of this; tectonic plates pushed North America and South America together, and species from each continent met via a central American land bridge. South America was introduced to many new animals, including predators such as bears and big cats, while North America received species like ground sloths and armadillo relatives called glyptodonts in return. 

The diversity of animals that moved from North America to South America was higher than the reverse, so South America gained more new residents. A 2020 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposed that this was due to a disproportionately higher extinction rate of South American mammals. In other words, more species in South America went extinct during the exchange and less were able to colonize North America.

"Perhaps the South American native mammals were more susceptible to the new predators," said Juan Carrillo, a paleobiologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and lead author of the 2020 paper. Predation by North American carnivores is just one hypothesis for what drove the asymmetric interchange. 

"The ground sloths and the glyptodonts were probably large enough to escape these predators," Carrillo told Live Science. "And that may be one of the reasons they were able to migrate to the north and we found them in the fossil record in many parts of North America."

Related: What's the first species humans drove to extinction?

But while the impact of modern invasive species on extinctions is clear, the interchange paints a more complicated picture. "It was not just one instant in the Earth's history but actually took over several millions of years and had different phases," Carrillo said. The South American extinctions took place during a period of climate change when Earth was cooling, which also likely had an impact.

But is it still fair to assume that at least some prey species in South America went extinct because of a North American predator coming in? It is possible, but it's difficult to disentangle that cause from climate change and other factors, Carrillo said.

Animal traits are forged in an evolutionary battleground, but that doesn't mean predators rise up to dominate their prey. Carrillo noted that if a predator were to eat its prey to extinction, it wouldn't have anything to eat and thus also would become extinct. If a predator has multiple prey, then it could, in theory, survive wiping out one species, but extinctions usually involve multiple factors.  

Blackburn doesn't know of any examples of a natural invasion in which a species consumed another to extinction. "The natural world is just inherently incredibly complicated, and it takes an enormous amount of work to tease out the processes that are generally going on," he said. 

Humans are clearly driving species to extinction through activities such as overhunting, destroying habitat and introducing invasive species. "The fact that those effects are so dramatic is itself almost strong evidence that these processes are real and very different to what's gone on before," Blackburn said. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Conservationists in Taiwan are racing to contain an invasion of non-native and highly toxic toads before the warty amphibians cause widespread damage to their new ecosystem. 

The cane toad (Rhinella marina) is a highly toxic species of toad native to the Americas, from the Central Amazon in Peru to the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. However, the species was also introduced across the globe in the early 20th century to various places, including the Caribbean, Australia and large parts of the Pacific, according to Amphibia Web. Adult cane toads range from 3.5 to 5.9 inches (9 to 15 centimeters) in length and have yellow and brown skin covered with irregular warts. When threatened, cane toads release a milky-white toxin from their skin known as bufotoxin, which oozes from glands behind their eyes and is lethal to most animals. 

Researchers in Taiwan learned of a possible cane toad invasion at a farm in a small town in Taiwan's central mountain range, after a local resident shared photos of a cane toad online. After seeing the photo, researchers from the Taiwan Amphibian Conservation Society immediately came to the farm to investigate.

Related: Mug shots: 10 lost amphibians

"A speedy and massive search operation is crucial when cane toads are first discovered," Lin Chun-fu, an amphibian scientist at Taiwan's Endemic Species Research Institute, told French news agency AFP. They reproduce rapidly, and "they have no natural enemies here in Taiwan," he added.

When the researchers arrived at the farm, they found 27 toads in the immediate vicinity. Since then, they have captured more than 200 cane toads in the area surrounding the town, according to AFP.

"I was shocked and worried when they found more than 20 [right away]," Yang Yi-ju, a toad expert at National Dong Hwa University who organized the search, told AFP. Cane toads are an extremely successful invasive species. They are only native to 14 countries but are now found in more than 40 countries, which has landed them a spot on the list of the 100 Worst Invasive Species overseen by the Invasive Species Specialist Group, an international advisory body of scientists and policy experts. 

Female cane toads can lay up to 30,000 eggs at a time and can mate year-round, Live Science previously reported. Unlike other toads, which are exclusively predators, cane toads can also act as scavengers, so they always have plenty of food to eat. Without natural predators, their numbers quickly explode, and they can seriously damage ecosystems where they're introduced.

In the past, people deliberately released these toads in countries that were suffering from pest problems. For instance, in 1935, Australia introduced the toads to eat cane beetles (Dermolepida albohirtum) that were ravaging sugarcane fields. But while the toads successfully squelched the beetle infestations, the toad population quickly grew out of control. 

Researchers believe that a black market pet trade could have caused the recent Taiwan cane toad invasion. Cane toads have long been a popular pet in Taiwan and are also used in traditional medicines, according to AFP. But in 2016, the Taiwanese government banned the import of cane toads, which led people to breed and sell them illegally. The leading theory is that the invasive cane toads either escaped or were abandoned by one of these black market traders. 

The researchers also think the invasion may have started months ago and gone unnoticed until now. "Taiwanese farmers generally ignore toads and even look favorably at toads when they find them, because they help rid the land of pests and are also a good luck symbol," Yang told AFP. "It never occurred to them that this is an invasive species from a foreign land."

The researchers are now hopeful that they have contained the invasion, but it is too early to tell for certain. "Next spring during mating season is when we [will] truly know for sure if we have contained it," Yang told AFP.

Originally published on Live Science.

The growing demand for space exploration is increasing the chances of alien organisms invading Earth and of Earth-based organisms invading other planets, scientists have argued in a new paper.

The researchers point to humanity's record of moving species to new environments on Earth, where those organisms can become invasive and harm the native species; they say such behavior suggests the same could happen with alien life from another planet contaminating Earth and vice versa, according to the paper, published Nov. 17 in the journal BioScience.

"The search of life beyond our world is an exciting endeavour that could yield an enormous discovery in the not-too-distant future," lead author Anthony Ricciardi, a professor of invasion biology at McGill University in Montreal, told Live Science in an email. "However, in the face of increasing space missions (including those intended to return samples to Earth), it is crucial to reduce the risks of biological contamination in both directions."

Ricciardi and his colleagues use the paper to call for more collaborative studies between astrobiologists searching for extraterrestrial life and invasion biologists studying invasive species on Earth. "We can only speculate on what kinds of organisms might be encountered if astrobiologists were to find life," Ricciardi said. "The most plausible life-forms would be microbial and probably resemble bacteria." 

Related: 9 strange, scientific excuses for why humans haven't found aliens yet

The scientists consider the risk of interplanetary contamination to be extremely low, partly because the harsh conditions of outer space make it difficult for potential hitchhiking organisms to survive a ride on the outside of a human spacecraft. However, we should still be cautious of interplanetary contamination based on the negative impacts that invasive species have had on Earth, according to Ricciardi.

Humans have damaged ecosystems around the world by allowing organisms to invade new environments they'd never reach naturally. For example, a fungus from South America called Austropuccinia psidii was introduced to Australia in unknown circumstances and is taking over the country's native eucalyptus trees, stunting their growth and sometimes killing them. 

The researchers noted that insular ecosystems that evolve in geographical isolation, such as on islands and in countries like Australia, are particularly vulnerable to invasive species, because the native wildlife in those places hasn't evolved adaptations to deal with such invaders. "Biological invasions have often been devastating for the plants and animals in these systems," Ricciardi said. "We argue that planets and moons potentially containing life should be treated as if they were insular systems." 

For evidence of interplanetary contamination, the researchers cited the Israeli Beresheet spacecraft that crashed into the moon in 2019 while carrying thousands of tardigrades, microscopic animals that can survive extreme conditions, including the vacuum of space, Live Science previously reported. A 2021 study published in the journal Astrobiology concluded that the creatures probably wouldn't have survived the impact of the lunar crash but that the incident demonstrates the potential for biological spills. 

Space agencies such as NASA have long been aware of the potential risks of biological contamination, and planetary protection policies have been in place since the 1960s, according to Ricciardi. "However, unprecedented risks are posed by a new era of space exploration aimed at targeting areas most likely to contain life," Ricciardi said. This includes the rise in private space exploration companies such as SpaceX that are making space more accessible, according to the paper. SpaceX, for example, aims to travel to Mars and beyond with its SpaceX Starship program. 

The researchers suggest increasing biosecurity protocols associated with space travel, focusing on the early detection of potential biological contaminants and developing plans for a rapid response to any such detections. 

Planets and moons have always exchanged material via meteorites, but human space exploration could accelerate contamination, said Jennifer Wadsworth, an astrobiologist at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Switzerland who was not involved in the paper.

The new paper is an "excellent overview" of the current and continuous need for strict and up-to-date planetary protection rules, Wadsworth said. One major issue is that current planetary protection guidelines are not mandatory, Wadsworth told Live Science. 

"The line between exploration and conservation is a thin one," Wadsworth said. "One shouldn't be abandoned at the cost of the other, but both require careful consideration and, most importantly, compliance." 

Originally published on Live Science.

Millions of giant spiders have invaded North Georgia, terrifying residents and spinning webs as thick as 10 feet (3 meters) deep.

Porches, power lines, mailboxes and vegetable patches across more than 25 counties in the state have been draped with the dense, wheel-shaped webs of the bright-yellow Joro spider (Trichonephila clavata), an invasive species originating in East Asia.

The first of the 3-inch (7.6 centimeters) spiders was spotted 80 miles (128 kilometers) northeast of Atlanta in 2014; it likely hitchhiked there inside a shipping container, its discoverer, Rick Hoebeke, the collections manager at the Georgia Museum of Natural History said in a statement. 

Related: See photos of spiders eating bats

Since then, the spider's population and range have expanded steadily across the state, but nothing prepared residents or researchers for the number of spiders they would face this year. Will Hudson, an entomologist at the University of Georgia, said his porch became unusable after being covered by a blanket of webs 10 feet (3 m) deep, and he claims to have killed more than 300 spiders. 

"Last year, there were dozens of spiders, and they began to be something of a nuisance when I was doing yard work," Hudson said in the statement. "This year, I have several hundred, and they actually make the place look spooky with all the messy webs — like a scene out of 'Arachnophobia.'" 

Common to China, Taiwan, Japan and Korea, Joro spiders are part of a group of spiders known as "orb weavers" because of their highly symmetrical, circular webs. Though they are venomous, they use the venom only to immobilise the prey they snare in their webs. The venom poses no threat to human beings, dogs or cats unless they are allergic to it. While the spiders may nip if threatened, their bites are not often strong enough to break the skin.

Most of Georgia's Joro spiders will probably die off by late November, but this is far from the last we will see of them. Now that the spiders have gained a foothold (or eight) in the U.S., experts believe that the arachnids could spread even farther into other states with similar climates. Female Joros lay egg sacs, spun together with silk, that contain at least 400 babies. When the hatchlings emerge in the spring, they ride the wind on a strand of silk, floating across enormous distances, much like the baby spiders in the E.B. White novel "Charlotte's Web".

A lot of invasive species tend to destabilize the ecosystems they enter, but some scientists are optimistic that the spiders could actually bring unexpected benefits. Nancy Hinkle, an entomologist at the University of Georgia, said Joro spiders kill off mosquitoes, biting flies and invasive brown marmorated stink bugs, which have no natural predators and are known for damaging crops.

"Joro spiders present us with excellent opportunities to suppress pests naturally, without chemicals, so I'm trying to convince people that having zillions of large spiders and their webs around is a good thing!" Hinkle said in the statement.

Originally published on Live Science

Florida plays the unfortunate host to many invasive critters, from lionfish to Burmese pythons, but last week, officials announced that they had successfully eliminated a particularly slimy invader from the state: the formidable giant African land snail. 

The kicker is, giant African land snails (Lissachatina fulica) invaded Florida once before, meaning this is now the second time the troublesome pests have been expunged from the state. This time around, the effort cost $24 million and required 10 years of work, The Miami Herald reported. 

"There's still only one place on Earth where the giant African snail has been eradicated," Trevor Smith, director of the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (FDACS) Division of Plant Industry, said at a news conference on Wednesday (Oct. 6). "It's right here, and now we've done it twice." 

"This truly is an exciting day for our state and for our country," Florida Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said, according to The South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

Related: Survival of the grossest: 8 disgusting animal behaviors 

Why the elation? Giant African land snails can grow to be 8 inches (20.3 centimeters) long, and when they don't consume enough calcium from the soil, they begin munching through the stucco on houses instead, the Herald reported. The snails not only pose a threat to homes but also to Florida's agriculture industry, as they regularly gorge themselves on fruits and vegetables. And in the wake of their destruction, they squirt out a trail of smelly, stringy poop.

Some say the giant snails can give people and their pets meningitis, but that's technically true of all snails, Gizmodo reported in 2014. Snails can pick up a parasite named Angiostrongylus cantonensis from rat feces, if they consume it. And then if a dog then slurps up that snail in their backyard, or a human eats some snail meat stuck to an unwashed lettuce leaf, the parasite can sometimes reach the membranes of the brain and spinal cord, trigger an infection and cause swelling. Thankfully, the condition can be treated with antibiotics, but that doesn't make the thought of accidentally swallowing giant snail flesh any less gross.

The snails first arrived in South Florida in 1966, when a child brought three of the creatures to the area from Hawaii, where they're also invasive, the Sun-Sentinel reported. (The snails were initially imported as pets, and they may have also clung to cargo shipped from Africa, according to the National Invasive Species Information Center.) The child's grandmother reportedly released the snails into her backyard, and once released, the three snails multiplied and soon numbered in the thousands.

The state had quashed the invasion by 1975, but in 2011, a new wave of these snails suddenly surged. Smith said it's unclear exactly where the new snails came from, the Sun-Sentinel reported. That said, a recent state investigation suggested that, in 2010, a religious cult had snuck dozens of the snails into Florida from Nigeria for use in healing rituals, according to the Tampa Bay Times. But the snails may have also been imported unintentionally on cargo planes or ships, Fried said at the news conference.

Related: Weird animal facts

After being spotted in Douglas Park near Coral Gables, Florida, in 2011, the monstrous snails soon spread across the rest of Miami-Dade County and parts of Broward County just to the north, according to the Herald. Over the past 10 years, researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the state of Florida have studied the snails' biology, to come up with strategies to kill the slimy creatures; they also kept track of reported outbreaks across the state. 

Since the start of the eradication effort, the team has collected and killed about 168,000 snails, the Herald reported.

The snails primarily come out at night and when it's raining, and they easily blend in with Florida foliage; when not out and about, the snails bury themselves under 6 to 8 inches (15 to 20 cm) of soil, making them even tougher to spot. So to find the pests, the state recruited two Labrador retrievers, Casie and Mellon, who trained for six months with the USDA to learn to sniff out the massive mollusks, according to the Herald. 

The most recent sighting of a giant African land snail took place in 2017, meaning the species can now be considered eradicated in the state of Florida. Fingers crossed, it'll stay that way.

Read more about the giant snail infestation in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald.

Originally published on Live Science.

The hatchlings of the invasive cane toad in Australia don't stand a chance against their deadliest predator: cannibal tadpoles who guzzle the hatchlings like they're at an all-you-can-eat buffet. But now, the hatchlings are fighting back.

They're developing faster, reducing the time that hungry tadpoles have to gobble them up, a new study finds. 

"If cannibals are looking for you, the less time you can spend as an egg or hatchling, the better," said study lead researcher Jayna DeVore, who did the research as a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Sydney and is now a biologist for the Tetiaroa Society, a nonprofit conservation organization in French Polynesia. 

Developing quickly, however, has its pitfalls. Compared with typically growing hatchlings, those that grew faster fared worse when they reached the tadpole stage of life, the researchers found. So it isn't "worth it to try to defend yourself in this way unless cannibals are definitely coming for you," DeVore told Live Science.

Related: Image gallery: Invasive species 

The cane toad (Rhinella marina) is a poster child for invasive species. The warty toxic toad, notorious for gulping down anything that fits into its wide mouth, is native to South America. In the 1930s, farmers in Queensland, Australia, thought the toad would be the perfect predator to gobble up beetles that were destroying sugarcane fields. But with no natural predators Down Under, the toad population ballooned from only 102 individuals to more than 200 million, according to WWF Australia. 

Another reason for their population spike is that female toads can lay more than 10,000 eggs at a time in small ponds. "When these eggs first hatch, the young can't swim or eat yet, so they can pretty much only lie there on the bottom of the pond until they develop into tadpoles," DeVore said.

The hungry tadpoles strike during this vulnerable hatchling period. "Once the hatchlings develop into tadpoles, they are too large and mobile for other tadpoles to eat them, so the cannibals have to work quickly if they want to consume them all," DeVore said.

Tadpoles that cannibalize the younger generation are doing themselves a huge favor; they're getting nutrients and eliminating later competition for resources. "When I first saw this behavior in the wild, I was amazed at how voraciously cane toad tadpoles sought out cane toad hatchlings and ate them," DeVore said. To determine whether this behavior was "normal" or whether it was an adaptation to extreme competition among invasive cane toads, DeVore and her colleagues compared Australia's invasive cane toads with the native-range ones, or cane toads from their indigenous regions.

Warty toad arms race

Several experiments revealed that the invasive toads — both the hatchlings and the cannibalistic tadpoles — are evolving at breakneck speed. 

In one experiment done more than 500 times with different individuals, DeVore and her colleagues placed one tadpole in a container with 10 hatchlings. Although the native-range tadpoles did engage in some cannibalism, "we found a hatchling was 2.6 times as likely to be cannibalized if that tadpole was from Australia than if it was from the native range," she said.

Moreover, the invasive tadpoles were much more attracted to the hatchlings than the native tadpoles were. In another experiment, the team placed tadpoles in a pool with two traps; one trap held hatchlings, and the other was empty. "In Australia, the cannibalistic tadpoles were attracted to the hatchlings; the odds that an Australian tadpole would enter the trap containing hatchlings were about 30 times those of it entering the empty trap," DeVore said. 

Related: Survival of the grossest: 8 disgusting animal behaviors 

In contrast, the native-range "tadpoles were not attracted to the hatchlings; they were just as likely to enter the empty trap as the hatchling trap," she said. "This demonstrated that this strong attraction to the vulnerable hatchling stage, which is what helps the cannibalistic tadpoles to detect and locate their victims in Australia, is not present in the native range."

Fighting back

To fight back, invasive hatchlings have evolved an escape strategy. When the researchers compared the time eggs and hatchlings spent developing, they found that the invasive toads developed faster than the native-range ones.

In both groups, "we found that cane toad clutches from Australia developed more quickly; they reached the invulnerable tadpole stage in about four days, whereas native range clutches took about five days," DeVore said.

In addition, the invasive hatchlings had a more "plastic," or flexible response than the natural-range hatchlings when a cannibal tadpole was present; the hatchlings from Australia were "more likely to be able to smell when cannibals are around and actually accelerate their development in response," DeVore noted.

While these strategies helped the hatchlings survive, they paid for it later. The researchers tested 1,190 tadpoles for survival, development, growth and plasticity, and found that those that developed faster as eggs and hatchlings to escape cannibalism fared worse and developed more slowly at the tadpole stage than the native-range tadpoles, the team found. 

Could cannibalism lead to extinction?

Could the cane toads eat themselves into extinction? Probably not, DeVore said.

"Australian cane toads may well be their own worst enemy, but I wouldn't expect them to go extinct anytime soon," she said. That's because the cannibals benefit too much from eating their own kind. After gaining nutrients and limiting competition, the cannibalistic tadpoles "transform into toads more quickly and at a larger size," she said. It's even possible that these "successful" toads will more rapidly invade new places in Australia.

"The good news is that cannibalism can control population growth," DeVore said. "So, although cane toads are unlikely to drive themselves extinct, these cannibalistic behaviors may help to regulate their abundance post-invasion."

The study was published in the Aug. 31 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Originally published on Live Science.

There's one less "murder hornet" nest in the world, now that workers with the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) have used a vacuum and cutting tools to suction up the invasive species and dispose of their home this week.

This is the first discovery of an Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) nest in Washington state this year, and the WSDA asked locals to continue to report suspected giant hornets and their nests to the agency.

"While we are glad to have found and eradicated this nest so early in the season, this detection proves how important public reporting continues to be," Sven Spichiger, WSDA managing entomologist, said in a statement. "We expect there are more nests out there and, like this one, we hope to find them before they can produce new queens."

Related: Photos: Murder hornets will haunt your nightmares

Entomologists found the nest at the base of a dead alder tree, east of the city of Blaine in rural Whatcom County. It's a familiar region to the WSDA; in October 2020, they found another Asian giant hornet nest just 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) away, and on Aug. 11 of this year, they received news of a live Asian giant hornet just 0.25 miles (0.4 km) away. The spot is just south of the U.S.-Canadian border.

Upon finding the nest, WSDA staff suited up to avoid being stung and then vacuumed up 113 worker hornets from the nest. The team also caught 67 additional murder hornets in the area with the stealthy use of nets. Meanwhile, the crew removed bark and wood from the decayed alder tree, which revealed a nightmare inside — a nest with 1,500 developing hornets that hadn't yet reached adulthood. The nest had nine layers of comb.

WSDA workers removed a part of the tree and the nest so that it could be studied at Washington State University Extension in Bellingham, which is also located in Whatcom County.

Asian giant hornets flew into public view in 2019, when they were first detected in the United States in Whatcom County. At about 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, they're the largest hornet in the world. Although native to eastern and Southeast Asia, they likely came over to the U.S. as "unwitting hitchhikers" via a traveler or shipping container, CBS news reported. 

Only females have stingers, but these social wasps often kill their beetle and honey bee prey another way: by ripping them to pieces. "They can conduct mass attacks on honey bee hives, destroying the hive in a matter of hours," according to the WSDA statement.

Murder hornets stings can kill people. In Japan, about 40 people die from murder hornet stings each year, a 2007 study in the journal Clinical Toxicology found. These deaths are often attributed to kidney failure, anaphylactic shock, heart attacks and multiple organ failure from repeated stinging, the study reported. 

The WSDA will continue to set traps for Asian giant hornets through the end of the season in November. If you live in Washington state and suspect that you found a murder hornet, take a photo of it, if possible, and visit https://agr.wa.gov/hornets to report it.

Editor's note: This article was updated at 3:36 p.m. EDT Aug. 28 to clarify that all females, not just the queen, have stingers. The males do not have a stinger, according to Animal Diversity Web.

Originally published on Live Science.

An invasive and destructive "murder hornet" has been spotted in Washington state for the first time this year, and the alien-looking insect was behaving accordingly — attacking a hive of paper wasps.

A Whatcom County resident reported the Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia), which can reach 1.75 inches (4.4 centimeters) in length, on Aug. 11, just 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the first-ever U.S. sighting of this species in December 2019 near Blaine, Washington, according to the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA).

"This hornet is exhibiting the same behavior we saw last year — attacking paper wasp nests," Sven Spichiger, WSDA managing entomologist, said in the statement. "If you have paper wasp nests on your property and live in the area, keep an eye on them and report any Asian giant hornets you see. Note the direction they fly off to as well."

Related: Photos: Murder hornets will haunt your nightmares

As their nickname suggests, murder hornets are savvy killers. When they find a honeybee nest, the hornets go into "slaughter phase," where they use their mega mandibles to kill and decapitate the bees by the thousands. Once they've slaughtered the hive — it takes just a few hornets several hours to take out an entire tens of thousands-strong hive — the hornets defend the hive as their own, snatching up the brood inside to feed their own offspring, WSDA said. 

The giant hornet can also inject prey with a sizable amount of venom to deliver a painful sting, WSDA said. The amount of venom injected in one sting could kill a human, though such fatalities are rare, according to WSDA. 

With this first sighting of 2021, WSDA will set up live traps in the area; entomologists will then tag the trapped hornet so they can track the individual back to its nest. Because the sighting occurred just a half-mile (0.8 km) from the U.S.-Canada border, officials there will also set up additional traps, WSDA reported in the statement. 

Last fall, WSDA used the same strategy to track these giant hornets. Once a nest was located in the hollow portion of a tree, WSDA crews had to don protective suits and face shields to get close enough to the nest for extermination. They filled the basketball-size nest with foam and then sucked the 100 to 200 hornets into vacuum canisters, Live Science reported at the time. To kill off any remaining insects, WSDA wrapped the tree where the nest was found in plastic and filled it with carbon dioxide.

Public reports of the Asian giant hornet are the key to finding and containing the invasive species, WSDA said. Last year, half of the department's 31 confirmed reports were made by the public. 

Native to South and East Asia, murder hornets are considered invasive, non-native species. They can wreak havoc on an ecosystem by decimating honeybee populations, the WSDA explained.

If you see a hornet and are wondering if it's THE one, look for the orange-yellow face, oversized, teardrop-shaped eyes and a structure just above the mandibles that is not rounded as in other Asian hornets but rather deeply scalloped along the edge (sort of like a mini superhero cape), according to the University of Florida. (Here's more on how to ID a murder hornet.)

If you do spot a likely candidate, and you're in Washington State, report the sighting using the Hornet Watch Report Form and email WSDA at hornets@agr.wa.gov.

Originally published on Live Science.

Football-size goldfish are taking over a Minnesota lake after being dumped by their owners. 

Officials at Burnsville, a city roughly 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Minneapolis, issued a warning urging residents to stop releasing their pet fish after recovering multiple foot-long aquatic invaders from the waters of the city's Lake Keller.

"Please don't release your pet goldfish into ponds and lakes!" city officials said in a statement on Twitter. "They grow bigger than you think and contribute to poor water quality by mucking up the bottom sediments and uprooting plants."

Released goldfish are known to grow to several times their domesticated size and have been wreaking havoc on the ecological webs that native species depend upon to survive.

Related: In photos: Thousands of goldfish swarm in Colorado lake

If kept in home aquariums, goldfish (Carassius auratus) usually grow no larger than 2 inches (5.1 centimeters) long, Live Science previously reported. But when released into the wild the teensy fish can balloon to monstrous scales; in 2013 one super-size goldfish captured in Lake Tahoe measured nearly 1.5 feet (46 cm) long and weighed over 4 pounds (2 kilograms), Live Science reported.

And despite their propensity to die while in captivity, the fish are as tough as they come in the wild — capable of living 25 years and surviving for up to five months without any oxygen. (The fish evolved to live in ponds that freeze over in the winter, so their bodies will instead convert carbohydrates into alcohol during this period, which they release through their gills). When these traits are coupled with rapid reproductive rates, goldfish are quickly able to dominate new habitats at the cost of native species.

Officials in Minnesota's nearby Carver County removed about 50,000 goldfish from local waters in November 2020, according to the Washington Post. The county has signed an $88,000 contract with a consulting firm to figure out how to better manage the rogue shoals.

"A few goldfish might seem to some like a harmless addition to the local water body — but they're not," according to a statement from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. "Goldfish are in the minnow family and can work their way through city stormwater ponds and into lakes and streams downstream with big impacts, by rapidly reproducing, surviving harsh winters, and feeding in and stirring up the bottom like their close relatives, the common carp."

Minnesota isn't the only part of North America suffering from goldfish invasions. Alberta, Canada is also facing similar problems, and officials near Spokane, Washington, have committed $150,000 to rehabilitating a nearby lake, KHQ news reported.

Originally published on Live Science

An invasive species is a type of animal, plant, fungus or any other living thing that has arrived in a new environment and can harm other species there.

You might hear the term "invasive species" used interchangeably with "naturalized species," "exotic species," "noxious species" and "non-native species." Although each of these terms has a slightly different meaning, they all refer to members of a species living in an area they aren't originally from. "An invasive species is almost always from somewhere else and there's concern that it could be harming the system," said Katharine Suding, an ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Species invasions are on the rise: Of all invasive species discovered during the past 200 years, about 40% were discovered after 1970, according to a study published in 2017 in the journal Nature Communications. Often, invasive species arrive in the new environment as people's pets, additions to someone's garden or stowaways on a boat. 

Global trade regularly carries species to new places around the world, inadvertently or deliberately. A 2009 review in the Journal of Applied Ecology suggests that the recent upswing in invasions has been propelled by globalization, economic growth and more efficient international transportation. The countries with the highest number of invasive species include the United States, France, Australia and China, a 2016 study in the journal Global Ecology and Biogeography found.

Related: Would you eat a python to save the Everglades? 

Why are invasive species a problem?

In 2010, scientists discovered Austropuccinia psidii, an invasive fungus from South America, in Australia. When the fungus spreads on Australia's eucalyptus trees, it takes over, stripping their branches of leaves, stunting their growth and sometimes killing them.

This fungus is an example of how invasive species can directly harm native species — in this case, by killing them. But other invasive species harm native species indirectly. For example, fish called bighead carp (Hypophthalmichthys nobilis) were brought to the United States from China in 1973 and now swim around the Mississippi River watershed, gorging on plankton. Plankton form the base of the watershed's food web, so when the carp eat the plankton, it results in a food shortage for small, native filter-feeding fish. When these small fish starve and subsequently disappear, so do the bigger fish that eat them. In this way, the carp create a nutrient shortage that ripples through the ecosystem, according to researchers at the University of Michigan.

Related: 'Crazy worms' have invaded the forests of 15 states, and scientists are worried

Other invasive species prey on native species or compete with them for water and habitat and, in doing so, threaten biodiversity (the variety of life in an ecosystem).

Invasive species can also cost people a lot of money. For example, new pests or pathogens can threaten crops and aquaculture. Invasive species management and damages have cost an average of $26.8 billion USD globally since 1970, according to a 2021 analysis published in the journal Nature. In response, conservationists, governments and land managers often attempt to mitigate damage caused by invasive species by eradicating them or keeping their populations low.

Are invasive species always bad?

By definition, invasive species can harm other species in their new environment, but that doesn't necessarily mean they will. 

"Many invasions occur where the [invasive] species can't survive or do well in the new environment," Suding told Live Science. Of those that establish themselves in the new environment, some invasive populations will grow abundant, while others will remain small and innocuous, she added. In rare cases, invasive species may even benefit some members of their new environment.

Take the tamarisk, for example. This genus of Eurasian shrubs was introduced to the United States as an ornamental plant in the 19th century and has since spread throughout the western U.S. The tamarisk causes problems: It sucks up a lot of water and secretes salt into the ground, thereby preventing native trees from growing around it. However, an endangered bird called the southwestern willow flycatcher (Empidonax traillii extimus) has begun breeding and feeding on the tamarisk, at least since the 1990s, according to a 2008 report in the journal Restoration Ecology. In this case, the invasive shrub is hurting some native species while helping another, by providing habitat to a bird in need.

Climate change is altering the way ecologists think about invasive species because of the shifting habitat borders for many species, creating habitat in parts of the globe where some species might have previously been considered invasive. Species around the globe are moving uphill and toward the poles as average temperatures rise, a 2017 review published in the journal Science found. And mosquitoes' habitat is expanding latitudinally and into higher elevations, putting more people at risk of diseases these insects carry, such as dengue and yellow fever, according to a 2019 study in the journal Nature Microbiology. Even though species pushed into a new environment by climate change fit the traditional criteria for invasive species, some ecologists give them their own designation: range-shifters.

Related: Monstrous 'murder hornets' have reached the US

Some ecologists have pushed back on the notion that invasive species always threaten ecosystems. A 2011 commentary by 19 ecologists, published in the journal Nature, argued that natural landscapes are changing permanently due to factors such as climate change, deforestation, land use practices and urbanization and, therefore, that conservationists should change the way they manage species. Rather than judging a species based on where it originated, the authors wrote, conservationists should focus on how species function in an environment, taking into account both the good and the bad.

In some ways, this new mindset is already taking hold. As native ranges shift and expand, conservationists have begun facilitating some species' transitions to new environments, rather than trying to eradicate them in the new areas, Suding said. Some conservationists have even moved species to new habitats on purpose, in a bid to help them survive in an altered global climate — a process called assisted migration.

Ways to manage and exterminate invasive species

When conservationists decide what to do about an invasive species, they perform a sort of triage, prioritizing species based on the threat they pose and how hard it will be to eradicate or manage them. In some cases, that leads to an all-out eradication effort; in others, conservationists try to keep the population of the invasive species low enough that it poses minimal danger.

In 2005, conservationists completed a four-year mission to eradicate 80,000 feral goats that roamed the Galápagos Islands. The goats had been brought to the archipelago about a century earlier and had spent decades grazing the vegetation, causing erosion and competing with tortoises for food and habitat. Goat cullers tracked them down with helicopters, corralled them and killed them — an operation that cost more than $6 million, according to a 2009 article published in The Journal of Wildlife Management. This large-scale eradication effort was considered a success, with vegetation rebounding after a couple of years, the researchers said in a 2011 study published in the journal PLOS One.

In 2009, researchers attempted to use crab traps to eradicate European green crabs (Carcinus maenas) from a lagoon in California. But the effort proved futile; after the team removed 90% of the crabs, the population more than doubled by the following year. Adult crabs eat their young, and the researchers had removed most of the adults, leaving the juvenile population unchecked, the researchers wrote in a 2021 study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Now, conservationists use a less aggressive strategy, keeping the crab population low enough to protect native species without attempting to eradicate them.

Recently, conservationists tested some creative strategies for managing invasive species. The U.S. Department of Agriculture tried to control the invasive tamarisk by releasing another non-native genus: leaf-eating beetles (Diorhabda spp.). In Florida, where invasive lionfish harm coral reefs, chefs have added the fish to their menus and fishers compete for prizes in lionfish derbies. These strategies have yielded mixed results. In the case of lionfish, studies have found that fishing can temporarily shrink their populations, but some ecologists warn that creating a market for lionfish might discourage conservation in the long run.

Related: The voracious and invasive lionfish is taking over the Atlantic. Here's why.

The best time to eradicate a dangerous invasive species is shortly after it has arrived, when it has been spotted once or twice, Suding said. "Once a species gets really abundant," she said, "you can imagine it's super hard to eradicate it."

Additional resources

• Learn about invasive species in your area with the Global Invasive Species Database, managed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
• Find ways to prevent the spread of invasive species on the U.S. Department of Agriculture website.
• Read the latest invasive species research in the journal Nature. 

Some call them crazy worms. Pick one up, and you'll see why, as the creepy-crawly jerks, writhes and springs out of your hand. (It may even leave its tail behind, as a grim souvenir.) And now, scientists are finding the wrigglers have spread to at least 15 states across the U.S.

The worms of the genus Amynthas — also known as snake worms, Asian jumping worms and Alabama jumpers, according to Smithsonian Magazine — are a highly invasive lot that first made their way to North America in the 19th century, stowed away on ships carrying plants and dirt. Since then, they've spread, well, like crazy, and have now been sighted in more than a dozen states, including Minnesota, Wisconsin, Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Louisiana, Indiana, Kansas, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and Oklahoma, Newsweek.com reported.

They resemble common earthworms, only smaller and brownish in color. However, their reputation is far more sinister. Adult crazy worms reproduce quickly and without mates, laying clutches of eggs the same color as the soil, according to Smithsonian. Once they hatch, the worms swiftly devour the nutrients in the topsoil around them, leaving behind a loose, grainy mess that resembles coffee grounds.

Related: Bizarre 'worm tornado' in New Jersey has scientists baffled

This nutrient-depleted soil erodes quickly, leaving little sustenance for native plants, or competing species of worms and fungi, Brad Herrick, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told PBS Wisconsin.

"One thing that we've noticed … is that these earthworms, not only do they change the soil structure and the nutrient dynamics in the soil, but they also somehow or another displace other species of earthworms that are already there," Herrick said.

It’s unclear how, exactly, the worms continue to spread across the country. According to a January 2020 article in The Atlantic, scientists think the worms could be hitchhiking from across state borders in imported plants, on the treads of truck tires, by clinging to landscaping equipment or even sailing down waterways (their cocoons can travel surprisingly far in water).

Researchers are still investigating the long-term effects of these highly invasive worms on North America's forests — but, in the short-term, it's clear they're bad news for soil and the native worms that live there.

For now, there's no good way to control their spread in forests that they have already infested, according to Newsweek, but there is some guidance on what to do if you spot one in your garden. Simply place any adult worms you find in a bag, leave them in the sun for 10 minutes, then throw them away. If, that is, they don't jump out of your hands first.

Originally published on Live Science.

The rotting body of a dead Amazon "river monster" recently washed ashore in Florida, raising concerns about whether this gigantic predatory fish has joined the Sunshine State's ever-growing list of invasive species, according to news sources.

But although it might thrive in Florida's warm waters, this fish, known as the arapaima (Arapaima gigas) — a sizable creature that can grow to be 10 feet (3 meters) long and up to 440 lbs. (200 kilograms), according to a 2019 study in the journal PLOS One — the odds are stacked against it, at least for now, said Solomon David, an aquatic ecologist at Nicholls State University in Louisiana who wasn't involved with the recent arapaima sighting.

That's because these fish have some very particular quirks: They breed only in specific areas, spend valuable time and energy caring for their young, and don't reach sexual maturity until they're about 5 feet (1.5 m) long and at least 3 to 5 years old, David told Live Science. Moreover, it would take many individuals to have a sustainable population in Florida, and so far, just one dead arapaima has been found.

In this case, the arapaima was likely an exotic pet in a person's private aquarium that either got too big for its tank and was illegally released into the wild or died in captivity and was dumped into the river, David said. "We don't even know if this thing was alive when it was dumped, if it was dumped in there," David told Live Science.

Related: Amazing arapaima: Photos of the Amazon's biggest fish

The remains of the arapaima were found in Cape Coral's Jaycee Park on the banks of the Caloosahatchee River, which empties into the Gulf of Mexico in western Florida, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported in early March. The normally greenish fish, which sports a reddish tail, had already turned white from decay, photos show. But though it wasn't the full 10 feet long, it was definitely an arapaima, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission told the Sun Sentinel.

This fish, also known as the pirarucu or paiche, used to be plentiful in parts of the Amazon River, but the species is now threatened in many places along its native habitat, David said. The arapaima is part of the bony tongue group, a slew of heavy-bodied tropical river fish whose tongues are studded with teeth and whose bodies are covered with large, mosaic-like scales that are hard, like armor, according to Encyclopedia Britannica. These scales are so tough, even piranhas can't bite through them — but that's just luck, as the arapaima evolved long before piranhas even existed, David said.

The arapaima is prized for its meat, and not just in rural regions along the river, where the fish's relatively boneless meat, once salted, can be stored without refrigeration, according to Miami Patch. In fact, Whole Foods Market sold commercially farmed arapaima, the grocery store chain said in a 2016 blog post. But wild arapaimas are threatened largely by overfishing, and it doesn't help that the species, one of the largest freshwater fish in the world, is relatively easy to spot. It's an obligate air breather, meaning it has to come to the water's surface every 5 to 15 minutes to gulp in air, according to a 2009 study in the Journal of Applied Ichthyology. 

Arapaimas evolved this breathing tactic because the Amazon has low oxygen levels. (Warm water holds less oxygen than cold water does.) Arapaimas don't have lungs but rather special tissue in their swim bladders that processes oxygen, Lesley de Souza, a conservationist who specializes in neotropical fishes at the Field Museum in Chicago, told mongabay.com.

Related: Image gallery: Invasive species

Invested parents

Unlike many fish that never meet their young, arapaimas are doting parents. During the Amazon's rainy season, usually from December to May, the river floods into neighboring floodplains. It's there, on the flooded plains, that arapaimas dig shallow nests where the females can lay eggs for the males to fertilize. Both parents guard the nest from predators, and they continue to care for the young once the eggs hatch just nine days later, according to a 2017 study in the journal PLOS One. 

Both parents release a milk substance from their heads, known as "arapaima milk," that is fed to the offspring, according to the study. In addition, the dads are devoted caregivers.

"The male provides an intensive parental care which can last up to three months, guiding the offspring above its darkened head into zooplankton-rich areas for feeding," according to the 2017 study. The female tends to swim around the male and young at a distance — it's not clear why, but perhaps to look out for predators or food — and usually leaves her "family" after about a month, after which she might reproduce with other males, according to the study. 

Parental care is a key reason arapaimas are likely not taking over Florida waters, as young arapaimas are "not very tough fish when they're small," David said. But if these fish make it to adulthood, they can live at least 15 to 20 years, according to the 2019 PLOS One study.

Granted, even though the odds are stacked against this fish in Florida, the arapaima could overcome these hurdles — perhaps they could find nesting areas on Florida's coast, raise their young, wait until they were big and old enough to reproduce and then repeat the cycle, establishing a viable population. If that were to happen, these voracious eaters would likely make a dent in populations of both invasive and native species of fish and small invertebrates that live in the vicinity, David said. However, these fish are so big, and take so long to mature, that it would likely be possible for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to track down and remove them, he noted.   

"We should be on the lookout — there's nothing wrong with being vigilant," David said. "But again, going from the fish to fearmongering is not the greatest way to learn about these fish," he added, noting all the negative media coverage these fish are getting.

Some outlets, including CBS and even the fishing magazine "Field & Stream," called the Amazonian fish "ugly."

"As somebody who is sort of a champion for the 'ugly' fish, I think we need to get away from that," David said. "I think they're really cool and amazing-looking fish. Just look at those red scales."

Originally published on Live Science.

Brown tree snakes can turn their bodies into lassos to shimmy up power poles and trees — a superpower that has allowed the species to invade new territory, new research has found.

This is the first time in nearly 100 years that a new type of snake locomotion has been identified. 

The bizarre behavior allows brown tree snakes (Boiga irregularis) — a nocturnal species first introduced to Guam, in the western Pacific Ocean, in the late 1940s or early 1950s — to climb large, cylindrical objects that cannot be scaled using any of the other four known types of snake locomotion — rectilinear, lateral undulation, sidewinding and concertina.

Researchers have named the new behavior "lasso locomotion" because it involves the snake wrapping its body around a cylinder in a lasso-like shape and shuffling upward. 

Related: Why are some snakes so venomous?

"I've been working on snake locomotion for 40 years, and here, we've found a completely new way of moving," study co-author Bruce Jayne, a professor of biological sciences and an expert on snake locomotion at the University of Cincinnati, said in a statement. "Odds are, there is more out there to discover."

Invasive species

Researchers from Colorado State University (CSU) accidentally discovered the lasso shuffle during a project designed to protect the nests of Micronesia starlings, one of only two native forest species remaining in Guam.

Lead researcher Julie Savidge, an emeritus professor in the department of fish, wildlife and conservation biology at CSU, first documented the decline of Micronesia starlings and other birds on the island in the 1980s. Even back then, she knew brown tree snakes were devastating the local starling population, but she could not explain how the snakes were able to climb high enough to reach the tall nests.

The snakes' extraordinary climbing ability is also a well-documented problem for locals, as the reptiles frequently climb power poles and cause electrical outages across the island, according to the National Invasive Species Information Center.

The CSU project aimed to protect the starling nests using a 3-foot (1 meter) metal baffle — a tube-like structure that surrounds the trunk of the tree and prevents most animals from climbing up. The researchers used camera traps to capture footage of their setup and to determine how effective it was.

"Initially, the baffle did work, for the most part," Tom Seibert, a fellow member of the emeritus faculty at CSU, said in a statement. "We had watched about four hours of video and then all of a sudden, we saw this snake form what looked like a lasso around the cylinder and wiggle its body up." 

"We watched that part of the video about 15 times," he said. "It was a shocker. Nothing I'd ever seen compares to it."

Champion climbers

After seeing the footage the team reached out to Jayne, who confirmed that the bizarre behavior was a new type of snake locomotion. He described the brown tree snake as a "champion climber," according to the statement.

All other snakes climb using concertina locomotion, which involves bending sideways to grip two different points at once. But with lasso locomotion, the snake uses its body to create the loop of the lasso and form a single gripping region, according to the new research.

"The snake has these little bends within the loop of the lasso that allow it to advance upwards by shifting the location of each bend," Jayne said in the statement. "It's impressive. They can climb vertically, using even the tiniest projections on a surface, and they can bridge enormous gaps in the tree canopy. They can push themselves up vertically more than two-thirds of their body length."

Now, the researchers are planning to use what they have learned to achieve what they first set out to do on Guam: foil the snakes and protect the endangered starlings.

"We can now potentially design baffles that the snakes can't defeat," Savidge said in the statement. However, "it's still a pretty complex problem."

The study was published Jan. 11 in the journal Current Biology.

Originally published on Live Science.

Floridians could begin seeing a new slithery item on their menus — Burmese pythons. The invasive species is so out of control in the state that the government may begin encouraging the new meal as a way to help keep the snake's numbers under control, as long as they aren't filled with toxic mercury. 

Before the recommendation, though, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC) has teamed up with the Florida Department of Health to find out if the mercury levels in pythons are safe to consume. 

If that's the case, python hunter Donna Kalil is already ahead of the game. She hunts pythons for the South Florida Water Management District and estimates that she's eaten a dozen pythons over the last three years or so, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel.

"It's a wonderful tasting meat," Kalil told the Sentinel. She describes it as an "acquired thought process" more than an "acquired taste."

Related: 7 shocking snake stories

The python problem

Burmese pythons became established in the mid-1990s in the Everglades National Park, in South Florida, likely as released or escaped pets and then became invasive, according to the FWC. A species becomes invasive when it ends up somewhere it shouldn't, due to humans, and upsets the balance of its new ecosystem, which has not evolved to cope with alien invaders, Live Science previously reported. 

Recent data suggests the population of pythons is expanding north and west within the Sunshine State. The longest Burmese python captured in Florida was over 18 feet (5.4 meters) long. Typically, they average between 6 and 9 feet (1.8 and 2.7 m). Due to their large size, the snakes have few predators and will consume a variety of animals, including mammals, birds and even alligators. Some of these prey are threatened or endangered native species, according to the FWC.

It's not unheard of for an invasive or just pesky species to be eaten as a means of controlling their populations. In Florida, the non-native lionfish and wild boar can be consumed for example. Even iguanas have been dubbed the "chicken of the trees," with the University of Florida publishing recipe ideas. So what is different about pythons?

Mercury accumulates

Python meat may be particularly vulnerable to mercury contamination, which poses a threat to human health. 

Mercury is a naturally occurring element in Earth's crust but human activities, such as mining and burning fossil fuels, have led to high levels of mercury being released into the atmosphere. It is then carried back to Earth through rainfall. Mercury pollution in the Everglades is especially high as water evaporating off its lush vegetation leads to the formation of giant mercury-absorbing rain clouds hovering above the area for most of the year, Live Science previously reported.

When mercury enters our freshwater and seawater systems, certain microorganisms can pick it up and convert it into methylmercury. This form builds up in the food chain as one contaminated animal is eaten by another. For a giant snake, cruising through mercury-infested swamps eating almost anything that moves, the risk of contamination is very real. 

Some of the pythons found in the Everglades have previously registered "strikingly high levels of mercury," more than double what the state of Florida considers safe for edible fish, Live Science previously reported. If consumed by humans, mercury poisoning may cause various conditions, including neurological and chromosomal problems and birth defects.  

In the new research, scientists will measure mercury levels in tissue from captured pythons. The objective of the study is to develop and share "consumption advisories for Burmese pythons in South Florida to better inform the public," FWC wildlife commission spokeswoman Susan Neel told CNN.

If you are worried about Kalil, who eats python several times a week, you needn't be. Her daughter bought her a mercury-testing kit to confirm the snakes she eats are safe, according to the Sentinel.

Originally published on Live Science.

Entomologists in Washington state may have destroyed a "murder hornet" nest in the nick of time, preventing as many as 200 new queens from establishing new nests. 

The nest, the first ever discovered in the United States, was destroyed on Oct. 24. State Department of Agriculture employees vacuumed the invasive hornets from the nest and found only worker hornets. Five days later, though, after they'd removed the nest from its tree and cracked it open, they found 76 live queens and 108 more still developing in their tiny cell capsules. 

"It's possible that some [queens] had emerged before we did the vacuum extraction and eradication on the 24th, but it's not entirely likely, it looks like we got there in time," state managing entomologist Sven-Erik Spichiger told reporters during a virtual press conference.

Related: Photos: Murder hornets will haunt your nightmares

Invasion of the murder hornets

Murder hornets, more acurrately known as Asian giant hornets (Vespa mandarinia), are native to East and Southeast Asia. They grow to an intimidating 3 inches (7.6 centimeters) long and pack a nasty sting. Their greatest danger, though, is not to humans. The hornets prey on native wasps, disrupting the ecosystem, and also attack and rip the heads off the honeybees crucial to agriculture. A hive of Asian giant hornets can destroy a hive of honeybees in mere hours.

"It's just one more thing that the managed honeybees don't need to deal with," Spichiger said. Managed honeybees are already threatened due to pathogens, parasites and pesticides. 

In September 2019, a hive of Asian giant hornets was destroyed near Vancouver, British Columbia. Later that year, reports emerged of Asian giant hornets near Blaine, Washington, and in December, a specimen was found that was confirmed to be one of the invasive insects.

Entomologists in Washington and British Columbia are now on a mission to eradicate Asian giant hornets in North America. On Oct. 20 of this year, Washington state agriculture department employees trapped a few of the hornets, affixed radio transmitters to them with dental floss, and tracked them back to their nest east of Blaine. 

By the numbers

After vacuuming as many hornets as they could out of the nest and removing it from its perch 8.3 feet (2.5 meters) up, the entomologists took the nest to a cold lab to count the insects and measure the nest. 

They found that the nest was 14 inches (35.5 cm) tall and about 9 inches (22.8 cm) in diameter, completely filling the void in the tree where it sat. Entomologists counted 776 individual cells in the nest, which made it relatively small for a Asian giant hornet nest; in their native range, the insects build nests of up to 4,000 individual cells, Spichiger said. 

Related: Googly eyes: Photos of striking wasp faces

In all, entomologists retrieved 112 non-mating female worker hornets from the nest and nine males. There were six unhatched eggs and 190 hornets in their larval stage, most dead by the time they were counted. Of the 76 live queens found in the nest, 75 would have been newly hatched in the time between when the nest was first disrupted and when it was opened in the lab, Spichiger said, and one would be the hive's active queen. Another 108 probable queens were found still sealed inside their cells in their pupal stage. 

In addition, three queens were found dead in a water bucket near the nest location in the days after the removal. Newly hatched queens stay near their nest for 10 days, being fed by workers, before mating and hibernating over the winter underground or in another warm, protected spot. In spring, the queens emerge to establish their own nests.

That means that this single small nest produced nearly 200 new queens that would have had the opportunity to establish their own colonies — though, Spichiger said, only a portion of those queens actually survive to do so.

It's possible that a few queens hatched and escaped before the nest eradication, Spichiger said, but their numbers would be few. 

"Frankly we're encouraged because of the number of queens we were able to count and kill," he said.

The State Department of Agriculture will continue to bait traps for the hornets as long as the weather is warm enough for them to fly. Any workers caught will be tagged and tracked in an attempt to find their nest. Any queens found would be seeking a mate and not likely to return to a nest, so they will be killed instead of tracked. 

Originally published on Live Science.

Eleven months after murder hornets were first discovered in the United States, entomologists have tracked down and destroyed the first nest of this invasive, venomous species. 

The Asian giant hornet (Vespa mandarinia) nest was found on private property in Blaine, Washington, on Friday (Oct. 23). On Saturday, state Agriculture Department crews donned protective suits and vacuumed the stinging insects out of the hive, according to the Associated Press. Next, the tree where the hive was found will be cut down so that crews can search for any baby hornets and determine if any queens may have departed to start new hives in the area. 

Asian giant hornets are nicknamed "murder hornets" for their nasty sting, which has been described as feeling like a hot nail driven into flesh. The hornets can also spray venom from their stingers, which can cause serious eye injuries. But the real threat from the invasive species is to honeybees; the giant hornets feed on honeybees, which are already declining in population. 

Related: Photos: Murder hornets will haunt your nightmares

"Only a few Asian giant hornets can take out 30,000 healthy honeybees in just a matter of a few hours," state Department of Agriculture entomologist Sven Spichiger told reporters in a news conference on Friday (Oct. 23). "And unfortunately, the managed honeybees we use here have no natural defense against them that's effective at all."

Between 100 and 200 murder hornets were found in the newly discovered nest, which sat about 7 feet (2.1 meters) up in the hollow portion of a tree, according to the Seattle Times. State entomologists have been on high alert for the hornets since they were first reported in Washington in late 2019. The hornets grow up to 1.75 inches (4.4 centimeters) in length and are native to South and East Asia. They have also been spotted in Canada in 2019 and 2020. 

To discover the nest, entomologists trapped four live hornets and attached radio trackers to the insects with dental floss. The hornets then led crews directly to the nest, which was the size of a basketball, officials said. 

Crews wore thick protective suits and face shields on Saturday as they filled the nest's exits with foam and then sucked out the hornets inside with vacuum canisters. They then wrapped the tree in plastic wrap and filed it with carbon dioxide to kill any remaining insects. The entomologists said they will continue to search for more hornets' nests in the area. 

Originally published on Live Science.

So-called "murder hornets" have arrived in the United States.

 The Asian giant hornet species (Vespa mandarinia) is a large social wasp about 2 inches long that has recently been spotted in Washington. The hornets sport orange heads, orange stripes and a pointed rear end with a big curved stinger. Native to eastern and Southeast Asia, they prey on honey bees — ripping them to pieces — and kill a few dozen people a year with their painful stings.

But how do you know if you've found one?

Related: Sting, bite & destroy: Nature's 10 biggest pests

In a new paper published May 9 in the journal Insect Systematics and Diversity, a trio of researchers gathered data on V. mandarinia and its close cousins in the Vespa wasp genus and put together a handy visual guide.

"Hornets in the genus Vespa are large, predatory, eusocial wasps native to Europe and Asia," the researchers wrote. "They prey on a wide diversity of insects, but several species are predatory on honeybees. Vespa nests can be physically large, with over 1,000 workers, but usually with hundreds of workers."

Many Vespa species other than V. mandarinia have turned up outside their native ranges, the researchers reported, including some popping up in North America. Many Vespa wasps look alike, with big, chubby, striped bodies. (Wasps in other genuses can look quite different.)

In Europe, for example, an invasive Vespa species known as V. velutina arrived from its native Asian environment (possibly in some Chinese pottery) and has since hunted honeybees and other pollinators, harming ecosystems that rely on those species. The wasp is also potentially deadly to anyone allergic to its stings. You can distinguish V. velutina from other Vespa wasps by its "distinctive yellow tarsi" (lower legs) and a "velvety appearing dark brown to black thorax [middle section] and metasoma [rear section]," the researchers wrote.

V. velutina, meanwhile, is only subtly different from V. crabro, a species that's native to Europe (and protected in Germany). The clearest difference? Unlike V. velutina, V. crabro has yellow markings on its rear end. (V. crabro is an invasive species in New York and other parts of North America.)

One challenge with identifying species by color alone is that within Vespa species, it's common to find different color markings in different regions. Photos are available in the paper to help confirm sightings.

V. mandarinia, the "murder hornet" species, sports yellowish and orangeish stripes on its rear end in images the researchers collected, as well as a black thorax and a distinctive orange face. Found in India, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Nepal, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Malaysia, Malaya, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, eastern Russia, Korea, Japan — and now the Pacific Northwest — it also has a characteristic tendency to nest underground in mammal burrows and the cavities left behind by decaying plant roots, the researchers reported, "enlarging them as the colony develops."

Unless you're a wasp expert, you probably can't confirm any wasp identifications from this paper alone. But if you've found a wasp that you suspect might be a "murder hornet," the new guide is a good place to start. Next, look for instructions from universities and local government offices on how to report invasive species. The Washington State Department of Agriculture has a website for reporting possible sightings and sharing photos of possible murder hornets, and provides images of similar-looking insects native to the area (like thin paper wasps, black and white bald-faced hornets, yellowjackets and elm sawflies).

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Originally published on Live Science.

Toxoplasma gondii, a "mind-controlling" parasite that causes the disease toxoplasmosis, has been found in public lands in Oahu, Hawaii for the first time, researchers have discovered. 

Though this parasite was previously found in people and in wildlife on the Hawaiian islands, it was unknown in Oahu's parks. And it hitchhiked there in free-ranging cats, which are a non-native species and are known hosts of the parasite. Thanks, cats.

Though, to be fair, cats aren't really to blame; people are the ones who first brought cats to the island and then allowed them to roam free. Felines that were abandoned then bred in the wild and formed feral colonies. These cat communities now threaten to expose local wildlife to a harmful and potentially deadly parasite, scientists wrote in a new study.

Related: 7 strange facts about the 'mind-control' parasite Toxoplasma gondii

Toxoplasma gondii is transmitted from cats to other animals — including humans — when cats expel the parasite in feces, in a capsulelike eggs, or oocysts. Once T. gondii oocysts enter a new host they transform to an actively multiplying form called tachyzoites, which can replicate so quickly that they overwhelm the host's immune system and lead to serious health problems.

One of the ways that Toxoplasma gondii affects mice and rats is by tweaking their brain chemistry to change their behavior. Rodents typically avoid cats, but under T. gondii's "mind control" they seek out felines. And that's exactly what T. gondii wants, because the infected rats need to be ingested by cats in order for T. gondii to complete its life cycle. 

And cats' impact on native wildlife doesn't stop with mind-controlling parasites; they are also highly efficient and deadly predators. Cats kill an estimated 2.4 billion birds per year in the U.S. alone, according to the Hawaii Invasive Species Council (HISC). They have contributed to the extinction of 33 island species and are recognized as the principal threat to 8% of all critically endangered reptiles, birds and mammals worldwide, according to the HISC.

Researchers recently looked for feral cat colonies and signs of Toxoplasma gondii at 32 locations on Oahu's parks and public lands inhabited by native bird species. They identified 25 cat colonies near places where native birds were plentiful. The exact number of cats in each colony was uncertain, but the scientists spotted roughly 23 cats on average at every location. Humans were feeding cats at most of these colonies, evidence suggested.

The scientists also gathered 56 fecal samples from four of the cat colonies. Three out of four of those colonies had cats shedding T. gondii, with about 10% of the samples testing positive for T. gondii. 

"The high percentage of T. gondii-positive feces samples suggests that Oahu's cats are contributing large quantities of this infectious parasite to parks and neighborhoods across the island," study co-author Grant Sizemore, the director of Invasive Species Programs at American Bird Conservancy, said in a statement. 

"What's particularly worrying is that these hardy oocysts move through the environment with the potential to infect any warm-blooded species in terrestrial, freshwater or marine ecosystems," he said.

As the team collected feces at only four locations, it's likely that T. gondii is even more widespread on Oahu — "and possibly other islands" — and poses an even greater threat to vulnerable native wildlife, the study authors reported.

"Our results should be considered an absolute minimum, and the occurrence of T. gondii in Oahu's environment is almost certainly higher," they wrote.

The findings were published online April 9 in the journal Conservation Science and Practice.

Editor's note: This article was updated on April 16 to clarify that while T. gondii had previously been found in humans and wildlife in Hawaii, this new evidence is the first to identify the parasite on public lands, and to link that presence to domestic cats.

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Originally published on Live Science.

Nutria, also known as coypu, are large rodents that live in areas with lots of freshwater. 

Despite sometimes being called swamp rats, nutria are not rats. These mammals are native to South America and were introduced into the United States between 1899 and 1930 through the fur industry, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Nutria are now considered a nuisance in the U.S. and other parts of the world where their populations have grown and their presence has disrupted the native ecosystem. 

What are nutria?

Nutria (Myocastor coypus) are relatively big rodents that grow to between 17 and 25 inches long (43 to 64 centimeters) from head to rump, which is about the same size as a raccoon. Their tail adds another 10 to 16 inches (25 to 41 cm) and the animals weigh between 15 and 22 pounds (7 to 10 kilograms), according to National Geographic. Although they're about the size of a raccoon, nutria look more like a cross between a small beaver and a giant rat, with two large, orange front teeth and long, rounded tails.

Nutria breed year-round and can have up to three litters a year with between two and 13 offspring per litter, allowing their populations to rapidly grow, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW). These mammals become sexually mature as early as 4 months old, and females can breed again about one to two days after giving birth, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). After a gestation period of about four months, nutria pups will nurse for about seven to eight weeks and stay with their mom for around 10 weeks, but pups can also survive on their own when they're as young as 5 days old.

It's estimated that up to 80% of nutria don't survive their first year, and those that do survive, only live for two or three years, according to FWS. However, nutria in captivity may live up to about 12 years, according to Oregon State University.

Nutria have a voracious appetite for wetland plants and will chow down an entire plant — roots, bark and all, according to Animal Diversity Web. The furry rodents will occasionally eat small invertebrates such as insects and snails, according to FWS. But nutria aren't considered picky eaters as they're often caught eating crops such as rice, sugarcane and corn.

Where do nutria live?

Nutria are aquatic creatures and prefer freshwater to saltwater. They live in burrows connected by tunnels that they dig near rivers, canals, lakes or in wetlands, according to National Geographic. 

These animals live in groups that typically consist of two to 13 individuals, according to the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology's Animal Diversity Web. The group often includes related adult females, their offspring and a single adult male. Young adult males are usually solitary, but don't often wander far from where they were born. Males have a home range of about 14 acres (6 hectares), while females stay even closer to home, keeping within about a 6-acre (2 hectares) radius.

Why nutria are a problem

Nutria are native to the marshes and coastal lakes in Bolivia and Southern Brazil, according to Columbia University. Their populations in those locations are kept in check by the seasonal drought-flood cycles. Periods of drought decimate their population, but thanks to their rapid reproduction rate, the nutria are able to recover during the flooding season. 

In the 1800s, fur traders brought nutria to the U.S. so that the animals could be easily harvested for their thick and soft undercoat of fur. But when the fur market collapsed in the mid 1900s, many nutria farmers couldn't afford to keep their animals and released them into the wild.

The nutria not only survived, but thrived in their non-native homes. Today, nutria populations are found across the U.S., primarily in the coastal states, according to FWS. They're also an invasive species in Europe, Asia and Africa due to fur-farm escapees, according to the Global Invasive Species Database.

Nutria are now considered one of the most ecologically harmful invasive species on the planet. 

"As an exotic invasive species in our North America wetlands, they can be especially destructive since plant species did not evolve with this forager," said Thomas Gehring, a professor of ecology and biology at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant, Michigan.

Nutria eat about 25% of their body weight each day in plants and their roots, wreaking havoc on the native ecosystem. Because the animals eat the entire plant, the vegetation are less likely to grow back, according to National Geographic. The removal of the root systems destabilizes the soil around the water, which causes it to quickly erode and become open water.

The burrowing habits of nutria also damages flood-control levees that protect low lying areas and water retaining levees used in agriculture, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Damage Management extension. Their activity can cause such extensive damage that the levees need to be completely reconstructed. The destructive creatures also burrow into the flotation supports under boat docks and wharves, underneath building foundations, roads, streams and dams, which can weaken these structures and cause them to lean, sink and collapse.

As mentioned, nutria will dine on numerous agricultural crops, such as rice, corn, wheat and more. They've also been known to gorge on home vegetable gardens and freshly planted grass.

Are nutria dangerous?

Not only are invasive nutria catastrophic for the environment, but they also play host to several diseases and parasites including tuberculosis, tapeworm, liver flukes and nematodes. It can be a significant health hazard for people and animals to drink or swim in water contaminated by nutria feces and urine, according to FWS.

How to prevent further damage

Because nutria are such a prolific and resilient species, controlling their populations to curb further environmental damage is a significant challenge. Environmental groups around the U.S. have tried a range of tactics, with varying success. 

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife has found that excluding nutria from their preferred environments to be the most effective approach. The agency recommends building 3-foot (91-cm) wire fences buried at least 6 inches (15 cm) underground around gardens and lawns, putting electric wire fences around vegetation, or constructing sheet metal shields around wood structures to prevent nutria from gnawing on them. 

But other agencies and experts think a more offensive approach is better. "The only effective means we have is trapping and/or shooting nutria," Gehring said. "But that takes a concerted and sustained effort." 

Related: Swamp Rats & Baby Dolphins! How Hurricanes Impact Animals

State agencies from Maryland, Virginia and Delaware have partnered with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and FWS to eradicate local nutria populations. The groups are working with public and private landowners to monitor the animals' habitats, so that they can set traps and humanely euthanize the mammals, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Some groups also use dogs to detect, track and trap nutria to prevent them from re-establishing their populations in locations where they had been removed, Gehring said. 

Continuous monitoring and removal of nutria is especially important as global warming increases the number of potential nutria habitats in North America, according to a 2019 study published in The Journal of Wildlife Management.

In many of the places involved with containment and eradication of nutria, groups are working to rebuild the ecosystem that the animals damaged or destroyed. In some instances, a wetland area can recover and rebuild itself on its own, but oftentimes active restoration efforts, such as planting native plants and replenishing the soil, are required to help rebuild the ecosystem, Gehring said. 

It just takes a single, pregnant female to quickly repopulate an area from which nutria were previously eradicated. So, in order to keep restoration efforts moving forward, it is important that any sightings of the creatures be reported to state and federal wildlife agencies, even in places where the animals are thought to be completely absent. 

Additional Information

• Here's a map of nutria populations across the U.S., from the United States Geological Survey.
• Learn more about saving marshes from nutria on Nature's Cool Green Science blog.
• Read more about how nutria are returning to wetlands where they were previously eradicated, from National Geographic.

Gruesome new video shows mice attacking an adult albatross on the World Heritage Site of Gough Island in the South Atlantic.

It's an alarming new behavior from the invasive mice, which have long been known to attack albatross chicks and eat them alive. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), a charity in the United Kingdom, released the disturbing video on Dec. 5.

Related: See Photos of Mice Attacking Albatross Adults & Chicks

"We have known for more than a decade that the mice on Gough Island attack and kill seabird chicks," RSPB field assistant Chris Jones said in a statement accompanying the video release. "While this is already of great concern, attacks on adults, which can produce dozens of chicks in their lifetime, could be devastating for the populations' chances of survival. … [T]hese gentle giants could now be lost even more rapidly than we first predicted."

Gough Island is a speck of land in the South Atlantic. House mice (Mus musculus) were introduced by sailing ships in the 1700s. The rodents quickly gained a foothold on the island, attacking and devouring the chicks of a variety of seabirds, including the critically endangered Tristan albatross (Diomedea dabbenena). A 2018 study funded by RSPB found that the mice are responsible for wiping out 2 million seabird eggs and chicks each year. With a ready source of largely defenseless prey at hand, the mice have evolved to be 50% larger than the average house mouse, according to RSPB.

In the new video, a mouse scurries into the nest of a Tristan albatross, brazenly crawling onto the adult bird's back and beneath its feathers. The bird turns uncomfortably and tries, apparently unsuccessfully, the reach the mouse with its beak. Albatrosses lay only one egg every other year, so every loss of an egg, chick or adult matters for population numbers.

The Tristan albatross range includes the southern Atlantic and Indian oceans, from Australia to South Africa to Argentina. There are an estimated 3,400 to 4,800 adults left in the wild, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The birds are threatened at sea by longline fishing, which can snare and entangle hunting albatross. On islands where the birds nest, rats and mice are a major threat. Gough island is now the breeding ground for 99% of the world's population of Tristan albatross.

Mice on Gough also threaten the Atlantic petrel (Pterodroma incerta), an endangered black-and-white seabird whose population is also concentrated ont Gough Island. There are an estimated 1,800,000 Atlantic petrels still in the wild, according to the IUCN, but their population has been declining by between a third to a half over the last three generations.

To stanch the losses, the RSBP is working with the government of Tristan da Chunha, a territory of Great Britain, to eradicate mice on Gough Island. The goal is to spread rodent-specific poisons  across the island by 2020. The project is seeking donations at www.goughisland.com.

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Originally published on Live Science.