Researchers have found promising signs for a possible increase of Antarctic blue whales, based on surveys spanning from 2006 to 2021.
A team of scientists analyzed data they collected from seven acoustic surveys conducted in the Antarctic region over the 15-year timespan. They used “sonobuoys” to detect marine sounds and ultimately gathered about 3,900 hours’ worth of sounds to review.
In the analysis, the researchers specifically sought out calls of Antarctic blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus intermedia), which are the largest animals on the planet but are currently critically endangered, according to the IUCN Red List.
The researchers explained that the whales’ song sounds are considered a 3-unit vocalization (written as A, B and C throughout the study), and together, the full call is referenced as the Z-call.
They found that Unit A calls were the most widely distributed in the recordings from the sonobuoys. Unit A calls and Z-calls were more prominent in late summer and early fall. D-calls, or non-song calls, were detected most in the summer, during the feeding season. The results were published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Antarctic blue whales are critically endangered, and this makes them difficult to find in the vast Southern Ocean, but they make very loud, low frequency calls that we can detect from hundreds of kilometers away, using acoustic technology,” said Brian Miller, lead author of the study and marine mammal acoustician at the Australian Antarctic Division of the Australian Marine Mammal Centre, as reported by Phys.org.
According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Antarctic blue whales are not just the largest animal on the planet, but also the loudest. Their calls can reach about 188 decibels, making them louder than a jet engine, and they can be heard hundreds of miles away. This makes it easier and more cost-effective for researchers to use audio to study the whales.
While the findings reveal regular calls from the whales and give hope for a potential increase in the population, the study authors emphasized that more research is needed to determine whether that means the whale population is actually rebounding.
“Maybe they’re getting louder, or maybe they’re calling more frequently. Maybe this population is increasing and that’s why we’re hearing them more often,” Miller told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “It’s going to take a bit more work for us to be able to answer that conclusively.”
In addition to the acoustic data, the researchers are also using other tools like satellite, video and even artificial intelligence (AI) to build a bigger database on the Antarctic blue whales. This could help provide more information about the whales, their calls and their behaviors, especially relating to the krill they eat. This primary food source for the whales is under stress from fishing and climate change, the study authors noted.
“Passive acoustic monitoring is poised to play a crucial role in future research addressing knowledge gaps about Antarctic blue whales,” Miller said.
When Chelsea Wood was a child, she would often collect Periwinkle snails on the shores of Long Island.
“I used to pluck them off the rocks and put them in buckets and keep them as pets and then re-release them,” Wood said. “And I knew that species really well.”
It wasn’t until years later that Wood learned that those snails were teeming with parasites.
“In some populations, 100 percent of them are infected, and 50 percent of their biomass is parasite,” Wood said. “So the snails that I had in my bucket as a child were not really snails. They were basically trematode [parasites] that had commandeered snail bodies for their own ends. And that blew my mind.”
Wood, now a parasite ecologist at the University of Washington, sometimes refers to parasites as “puppet masters,” and in many cases, it’s not an exaggeration. Some can mind-control their hosts, for example, causing mice to seek out the smell of cat pee. Others can shape-shift their hosts, physically changing them to look like food. And their ripple effects can reshape entire landscapes.
Estelle Caswell / Grist
For centuries, people have thought of parasites as nature’s villains. They often infect people and livestock. In fact, parasites are by definition bad for their hosts, but today, more scientists are starting to think about parasites as forces for good.
“I don’t think anyone is born a parasitologist. No one grows up wanting to study worms,” Wood said. “Somewhere along the way, I like to say, they got under my skin. I just fell in love with them. I couldn’t believe that I’d gotten that far in my biology education and no one had ever mentioned to me that parasites are incredibly biodiverse, ubiquitous, everywhere.”
On a cloudy August morning, Wood took me to Titlow Beachin Washington state,one of her team’s research sites.Back in the 1960s, one of Wood’s research mentors had sampled shore crabs here. At the time, the area was very industrial and heavily polluted. But when researchers, including Wood, came back to collect samples half a century later, the beach had transformed. The water was cleaner and the shorebirds had returned, but those weren’t the only promising signs: The crabs were now full of trematode worms, a type of parasite that jumps between crabs and birds.
Chelsea Wood kneels to search for shore crabs at a beach in Tacoma, Washington. She will later dissect the crabs to search for parasites. Jesse Nichols / Grist
The parasites were a sign that the local shorebirds were doing great, Wood explained.
As scientists have learned more about parasites, some have argued that many ecosystems might actually need them in order to thrive. “Parasites are a bellwether,” she said. “So if the parasites are there, you know that the rest of the hosts are there as well. And in that way they signal about the health of the ecosystem.”
To understand this counterintuitive idea, it’s helpful to look at another class of animals that people used to hate: predators.
For years, many communities used to treat predators as a kind of vermin. Hunters were encouraged to kill wolves, bears, coyotes, and cougars in order to protect themselves and their property. But eventually, people started noticing some major consequences. And nowhere was this phenomenon more apparent than in Yellowstone National Park.
In the 1920s, gray wolves were systematically eradicated from Yellowstone. But once the wolf population had been eliminated from the park, the number of elk began to grow unchecked. Eventually, herds were overgrazing near streams and rivers, driving away animals including native beavers. Without beavers to build dams, ponds disappeared and the water table dropped. Before long, the entire landscape had changed.
In the 1990s, Yellowstone changed its policy and reintroduced gray wolves into the park. “When those wolves came back in, it was like a wave of green rolled over Yellowstone,” Wood said. This story became one of the defining parables in ecology: Predators weren’t just killers. They were actually holding entire ecosystems together.
“I think there’s a lot of parallels between predator ecology and parasite ecology,” Wood said.
Like the gray wolves in Yellowstone, scientists are just starting to recognize the profound ways that ecosystems are shaped by parasites.
Take, for example, the relationship between nematomorphs, a type of parasitic worm, and creek water quality. The worms are born in the water, but spend their lives on land inside of bugs, like crickets or spiders.
A nematomorph worm swims in a beaker in Chelsea Wood’s office in Seattle
At the end of their lives, nematomorphs need to move back to the water to mate. Instead of making the dangerous journey themselves, they trick their infected hosts into giving them a ride by inducing a “water drive,” an impulse on the part of its insect host to immerse itself in water. The insect will move to the edge of the water, consider it for a little while and then jump in — to its own death, but to this parasite’s benefit.
The story doesn’t end there. In a way, the entire creek ecosystem relies on a worm trying to hitch a ride to the water. Fish eat the bugs that throw themselves in the water. In fact, one species of endangered trout gets 60 percent of its diet exclusively from these infected bugs. “So essentially, the parasite is feeding this endangered trout population,” Wood said.
With less of the threat associated with hungry fish, the native insects in the stream can thrive, eating more algae and thereby giving the creek clear water.
Parasites make up an estimated 40 percent of the animal kingdom. Yet, scientists know next to nothing about millions of parasite species around the world. The main parasites that scientists have spent a lot of time studying are the ones that infect farm animals, pets, and people.
Many of these alarming parasites, like ticks or the parasitic fungus that causes Valley Fever, are expected to increase due to climate change. But no one actually knows what climate change means for parasites, broadly — or how any big change in parasites might reshape the world. “There’s this general sense that infection is on the rise, that parasites and other infectious organisms are more common than they used to be,” Wood said. “At least for wildlife parasites, there really isn’t long-term data to tell us whether that impression that we have is real,” Wood said. “We had to invent a way to get those data,” Wood said.
Wood had an unconventional idea of where to look: a collection of preserved fishes locked away in a museum basement.
Chelsea Wood holds a jar of preserved fish from the University of Washington Fish Collections.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
The University of Washington Fish Collections is home to more than 12 million samples of preserved fishes, dating all the way back to the 1800s. But the thousands of jars lining the collection shelves also contain something else: all the parasites living inside the fish samples.
“So much has been discovered from museum specimens that we tucked away at one time, and then pulled off the shelf 100 years later,” said Wood. “It’s really remarkable to get to peer back in time the way that you do when you open up a fish from a hundred years ago. It’s the only way that we’ll know anything about what the oceans were like, parasitologically, that long ago.”
Chelsea Wood dissects fish samples in her lab at the University of Washington. Jesse Nichols / Grist
Wood and her team spent over two years opening up jars and surgically dissecting the parasites from within. Under microscopes, they identified and counted the parasites before returning everything for future study. In the end, they found more than 17,000 parasites.
Looking at the number of parasites found in fishes over time, the researchers found a mix of winners and losers, but there was one big class of parasites that was unequivocally declining: complex parasites, the kinds that need several different host species in order to survive. That type of parasite declined an average of 10 percent each decade, the team found.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
In Wood’s investigation, there was only one factor that perfectly explained the decline in parasites: It wasn’t chemicals or overfishing. It was climate change. It made a lot of sense: Complex parasites can only survive if everyone one of those host species are around. If just one type of host goes missing? “Game over. That’s it for that parasite,” Wood said. “That’s why we think that these complex life cycle parasites are so vulnerable: because things are shifting, and the more points of failure you have, the likelier you are to fail.”
Wood said that, before this study, researchers had no idea climate change was wiping out this important class of parasites.
Chelsea Wood holds a jar of fish that her lab dissected for a study published in 2023.
Jesse Nichols / Grist
“It’s likely a collateral impact,” she said. “We don’t even have a handle on how many parasites there are in the world, much less the scale of parasite biodiversity loss right now. But the early indications are that parasites are at least as vulnerable as their hosts, and potentially more vulnerable.”
Wood says that it’s important for people to understand that parasites play huge and complex roles in nature, and if we ignore what we can’t see, we risk missing out on understanding how the world really works. “We all have a reflexive distaste for parasites, right? We take drugs, we apply chemicals, we spray, Wood said. “Our argument is that parasites are just species. They’re part of biodiversity, and they’re doing really important things in ecosystems that we depend upon them for.”
Long known to be the peaceful close relative of humans, scientists have discovered that the endangered bonobo is more complicated than previously believed.
A new study has observed male bonobos acting aggressive more often than male chimpanzees within their own communities. The researchers also found that more aggressive males of both species had more mating opportunities.
“Chimpanzees and bonobos use aggression in different ways for specific reasons,” said lead author of the study Maud Mouginot, a Boston University anthropologist, in a news release from Cell Press. “The idea is not to invalidate the image of bonobos being peaceful — the idea is that there is a lot more complexity in both species.”
Earlier studies had looked at aggression in both bonobos and chimpanzees, but this was the first to use the same methods of comparison for the two species’ behavior in the field.
“I think earlier studies did not really try to quantitatively compare the two species. There are papers on chimpanzee’s aggression, and few on bonobo’s aggression, but the methods used do not allow us to directly compare those studies (they have different methods or it is too unclear),” Mouginot told EcoWatch in an email. “Only one study did this (Surbeck et al. 2017), however, they used different methods [in] the field. For the chimpanzees they used group follow (e.g., following a group the entire day) and all day focal follow (e.g., following one individual and recording all their behaviors), for bonobos they used group follow and 10-min focal follow. Because those methods were different, we decided to use data that used the same method on the two species (all day male focal follow).”
The study, “Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees,” was published in the journal Current Biology.
The research team examined male aggression rates in three communities of bonobos at Democratic Republic of Congo’s Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve, as well as two communities of chimpanzees at Tanzania’s Gombe National Park.
The team looked at a dozen bonobos and 14 chimpanzees, tracking one individual at a time for a whole day, noting the frequency of their aggressive interactions, who they were with and if they engaged in physical contact such as pushing and biting or chasing their adversary.
“You go to their nests and wait for them to wake up and then you just follow them the entire day — from the moment they wake up to the moment they go to sleep at night — and record everything they do,” Mouginot said in the press release.
Overall, the researchers found male bonobos to be aggressive more often than chimpanzees, engaging in three times more physical aggressions and 2.8 times as many aggressive interactions.
Male bonobos were almost only aggressive toward other males, while chimpanzees were apt to be aggressive toward females. Aggression by chimpanzees was more likely to involve male “coalitions” — 13.2 percent compared with one percent of bonobo aggressions.
“Male chimpanzees form coalitions for within group fights but especially for territory defense (which include border patrols or sometimes, killing raids). When one male fights another male from his group, he is taking the risk of losing an important coalitionary partner which would have helped for territory defense. Therefore, this might affect their ability to efficiently defend their group against other groups,” Mouginot told EcoWatch.
The researchers believe coalitions may be one of the reasons aggression is not as frequent among chimpanzees. When groups of males fight, there is the potential for more injuries. And if the fighting is within their own community, it could weaken the ability of the group to fend off other groups.
This isn’t an issue for bonobos since most of their altercations are one-on-one. They are also not believed to be territorial and have never been known to kill one another.
More aggressive males of both species had greater mating success.
“Male bonobos that are more aggressive obtain more copulations with females, which is something that we would not expect,” Mouginot said in the press release. “It means that females do not necessarily go for nicer males.”
This was surprising for the researchers to see within bonobo communities, since they have a social dynamic where females frequently outrank males.
“I don’t think females are specifically attracted to more aggressive males. First, by acting aggressively against other males, more aggressive males may manage to push away other males and then spend more time with females. Second, males are aggressive toward other males but avoid acting aggressively against females. One study (Surbeck et al. 2012) shows that more aggressive males spend more time affiliating with females,” Mouginot told EcoWatch.
In the future, the research team would like to compare the aggressive behavior of other groups of bonobos and chimpanzees to see if that behavior varies between subspecies and communities.
“I’d love to have the study complemented with comparable data from other field sites so we can get a broader understanding of variation within and between species,” Mouginot said in the press release.
Bonobos are listed on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species as endangered. They are only found in forests located below the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Despite their threatened status, Mouginot said there are things people can do to help these rare primates from disappearing altogether.
“People can help by learning about bonobos, spreading their knowledge and sharing the critical situation in which bonobos are. They can also follow local or international associations such as BCI (Bonobo Conservative Initiative). They can make donations to those associations or to research centers to help pursue research which helps to maintain reserves and protect the bonobos too,” Mouginot told EcoWatch.
Bonobos are threatened by illegal hunting, agriculture and development, but Mouginot remains optimistic.
“The future of bonobos is very uncertain. They are endemic to one country (the Democratic Republic of Congo), which makes our ability to save them harder. They are losing their territory over farming and villages, they are also victims of poaching. The IUCN estimates that there are only 15,000 bonobos left, however, they are so remote in the rainforest that it is hard to get an exact count. Nevertheless, I don’t think we should lose hope,” Mouginot said. “Reserves, such as the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve and many others, help to protect the species. Research also helps by improving our understanding of bonobos and by helping building reserves.”
The United Kingdom installed nearly 6,000 new public electric vehicle (EV) chargers in the first three months of this year — a record number — in the race to accommodate the influx of battery-powered cars.
The quarterly figures were provided by Bristol-based data company ZapMap and published by the UK’s Department for Transport.
“I think there is a coming together of two things,” said Ben Nelmes, chief executive of EV thinktank New AutoMotive, as The Guardian reported. “Some of the barriers have been mitigated. And the private sector has woken up to the opportunity.”
Nelmes pointed out that local councils had gradually been taking advantage of charger installation grants provided by the central government.
Roughly 1,500 of the new installations were rapid chargers, which can charge a car in under an hour.
At the end of April, the UK had 61,232 EV charging points at 32,697 charging stations, ZapMap said. That’s a 45 percent increase in total chargers since April of last year.
Nelmes said the recent expansion of charging infrastructure in the UK had brought public charging stations to areas that had been historically underserved, reported Electrek.
Higher interest rates have affected the sales of some major EV companies like Tesla and BYD in China, The Guardian reported.
The share of total car sales in the UK that are EVs has plateaued at 15.5 percent in 2024, following earlier fast growth.
Some people who are in the market for a new car have expressed concern about EV range or lack of adequate charging stations. The UK is addressing the issue by increasing the number of chargers, especially in areas where demand is high.
In a survey conducted by the Electric Vehicle Association last year, just six percent of England’s EV owners said they had range anxiety fairly or very often. Occasional, rare or a complete lack of range anxiety was reported by 94 percent of those taking the survey.
More than half of London’s 15,000 black cabs are hybrid-electric with range-extending internal combustion engines, reported Electrek. Most of the city’s biggest minicab and taxi services have committed to using fleets that are fully electric by next year.
The amount of charging stations and individual chargers varies greatly by region in the UK. London is the best place to own an EV for the number of chargers, with 221 per 100,000 people. Off-street parking can be hard to come by in the capital city of approximately nine million, so EV owners must rely on public charging stations.
Northeast England is the fastest growing region for the number of chargers per person, with the southwest part of the country in second place. Northern Ireland had the least number of chargers in the UK with just 29 for every 100,000 people.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has announced a ban on the selling and distribution of lab-grown meat in the state, the first law of its kind in the United States.
With the ban, DeSantis said he would be saving beef from the “global elite,” reported BBC News.
“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a press release from the State of Florida. “Our administration will continue to focus on investing in our local farmers and ranchers, and we will save our beef.”
The press release said the state was “taking action” in response to what it referred to as a goal by the World Economic Forum to force people to eat cultivated meat and insects.
“While the World Economic Forum is telling the world to forgo meat consumption, Florida is increasing meat production, and encouraging residents to continue to consume and enjoy 100% real Florida beef,” the press release said.
Arizona, Alabama and Tennessee are looking at similar initiatives, BBC News reported. The U.S. first approved lab-grown meat in 2022.
According to the World Economic Forum, cultivated meat can serve as a more environmentally-friendly and efficient source of food for an expanding global population.
Lindsay Cross, a Florida State Representative of the Democratic Party, referred to the ban as “anti-business and contrary to how we’ve tried to market Florida as a place of free enterprise. We should have more choices for our consumers,” reported The New York Times.
Cultivating meat involves removing cells from live animals and feeding them proteins, salt, fats, sugars, amino acids, vitamins and minerals and allowing them to multiply in large tanks. The meat product produced can then be made into standard shapes, like sausages and patties.
Wilton Simpson, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, said in the press release that the ban was necessary to protect “the integrity of American agriculture” and called cultivated meat “a disgraceful attempt to undermine our proud traditions and prosperity.”
The edible insects lobby has asked the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to include insect products like mealworms and protein powder made from crickets in its safe ingredients database, BBC News reported.
DeSantis said with the new law he was “fighting against an ideology that ultimately wants to eliminate meat production in the US and around the globe.”
Cultivated meat company Good Meat said in a post on X that it was “disappointed” by Florida’s new regulations.
“In a state that purportedly prides itself on being a land of freedom and individual liberty, its government is now telling consumers what meat they can or cannot purchase,” wrote Good Meat, as reported by The Hill. “The law is a setback for everyone: Floridians who deserve the right to eat whatever safe and approved meat they want; Florida’s technology sector, innovators and entrepreneurs; and all those working to stop the worst impacts of climate change.”
The range of venomous snakes could look a lot different globally by 2070, according to a new study. Climate change is leading to habitat loss, which is likely to push venomous snakes into new regions.
An international research team, led by professor Pablo Ariel Martinez of the Federal University of Sergipe, studied data on 209 venomous snake species from around the world. The ranges of some venomous snake species could double by 2070, according to the study, which was published in the journal Lancet Planetary Health.
“Climate change is expected to have profound effects over the years. We are talking about consequences such as the loss of biodiversity and changes in the poisoning patterns of humans and domestic animals,” Martinez said in a statement.
The west African gaboon viper (Bitis rhinoceros) could see a 251% increase in habitable range by 2070, followed by a 136% potential increase for asp vipers (Vipera aspis) and a 118% potential increase for horned vipers (Vipera ammodytes).
However, not all venomous species will see an increase in range. Several species — including green bush vipers (Atheris squamigera), rock vipers (Montivipera xanthina), hognosed pit vipers (Porthidium nasutum), and pygmy copperheads (Austrelaps labialis) — are expected to lose more than 70% of their potential range, which would also affect the snakes’ native ecosystems.
In addition to analyzing the future distribution of different venomous snakes, the researchers reviewed which countries are likely to see an influx of venomous snakes as well as what areas of the world will be more vulnerable to venomous snake bites.
According to the findings, countries including Niger, Namibia, China, Nepal and Myanmar may see a rise in the number of venomous snake species in their countries, as the snakes may migrate from neighboring countries. But the greatest losses of venomous snake species and their habitats are likely to occur in South America and southern Africa.
The researchers also predicted that southeast Asia and Africa — especially Uganda, Kenya, Bangladesh, India and Thailand — may become the most vulnerable to increased conflicts between humans and the snakes. That’s because these regions, which can be important for agriculture, could also become more suitable for snake habitats amid climate change. In particular, flooding events can push snakes closer to human communities as they seek dry places, and this can increase risk of snake bites.
“As more land is converted for agriculture and livestock rearing, it destroys and fragments the natural habitats that snakes rely on,” Martinez and co-author Talita Ferreira Amado, of the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research, told The Guardian. “However, some generalist snake species, especially those of medical concern, can adapt to agricultural landscapes and even thrive in certain crop fields or livestock areas that provide food sources like rodents.”
The study authors stressed that climate change is leading to increased habitat loss for these snakes, and the results threaten snakes, ecosystems and public health.
“Our research shows that when venomous snakes start showing up in new places, it’s a wake-up call for us to start thinking about how we can keep ourselves and our environment safe,” the study authors said, as reported by The Guardian.
