Tag Archives: ecology

Anywhere else in the world, more trees would be a blessing. But in the far north of Alaska, they’re a reckoning. As the Arctic warms up to four times as fast as the rest of the planet, white spruce trees are now spreading into tundra that was once inhospitable. Bully …

For nearly a year now, a bizarre heating event has been unfolding across the world’s oceans. In March 2023, global sea surface temperatures started shattering record daily highs, and have stayed that way since. You can see 2023 in the orange line below, the other gray lines being previous years. …

Don’t let their fluff fool you: Your cat was built for murder. Felines, no matter how chonky, eepy, or boopable, are remarkably adaptable obligate carnivores, down to eat just about anything that fits in their mouth. Well-intentioned (or … threatening?) gifts of dead birds, rats, and lizards are familiar to …

One of the world’s most peculiar test beds stretches above Princeton, New Jersey. It’s a fiber optic cable strung between three utility poles that then runs underground before feeding into an “interrogator.” This device fires a laser through the cable and analyzes the light that bounces back. It can pick …

This story originally appeared on Yale Environment 360 and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In 2015 a lightning strike started what became known as the Rough Fire, which eventually burned more than 150,000 acres of forest east of Fresno and just west of Kings Canyon National Park. The …

Boom and bust don’t hit much harder than in the Bering Sea. After reaching historically high numbers, the population of snow crabs there cratered by 90 percent following a heat wave in 2018 and 2019. Some 10 billion disappeared. Water temperatures had risen 3 degrees Celsius, but that probably didn’t …

This story originally appeared in High Country News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. On July 1, 2022, a National Park Service biologist named Jeff Arnold was hauling nets through a slough off the Colorado River, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, when he captured three greenish …

In 2010, a 19-year-old migrant farmworker from Mexico arrived at a sugarcane plantation in Louisiana unknowingly carrying a deadly virus. His symptoms were mild at first: fatigue, shoulder pain, and numbness in one of his hands. As his condition worsened, he was admitted to a hospital in New Orleans. There, …

This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Roman Empire fell more than 1,500 years ago, but its grip on the popular imagination is still strong, as evidenced by a recent trend on TikTok. Women started filming the men in their lives to …

Salmon are legendary for their commitment to procreation. You know the drill: They wander the ocean before returning to rivers where they hatched, fire themselves upstream to spawn, and then drop dead. It’s not such a rigid life cycle, though. In fact, it’s a system that’s allowed a species like …