ecology

Sticky spider-web traps are promising non-invasive and cheap tools for terrestrial vertebrate monitoring.

The 2.4-million-year-old environmental DNA fragments collected from permafrost in northern Greenland unlock insights into an ancient ecosystem.

New techniques to quantify what lived in and on preserved animals throw light on how parasite abundance has changed over time.

Getting it wrong can harm the very creatures that scientists are trying to protect.

Splitting Chinook salmon into two groups based on their DNA could aid conservation efforts. But some researchers argue that this would be a misuse of the data.

Chinook make their way up the Klamath River every year, but fewer and fewer arrive in the spring.

Various concerned groups have been petitioning NOAA Fisheries to list spring-run Chinook salmon in Oregon and Northern California for over a decade.

The eRNA detection method could one day be used to catch early warning signs of distress in wild ecosystems. 

The black fur allele has fitness costs but also confers higher immunity against canine distemper virus, making mix-and-match mating key to population survival.

Immunoglobulin genes might have evolved much earlier than previously expected, perhaps even in the common ancestor of Cnidarians and Bilateria, a study suggests.

The broken-wing display, in which birds fake being wounded to protect their nests from predators, is found across the avian phylogenetic tree, a study finds.

Polluted air impedes the trees’ ability to read one another’s signals, a study finds.

Mahi-mahi were more likely to be eaten and less likely to spawn after being exposed to sublethal concentrations of oil, raising concerns about the risks oceanic drilling pose to life in the ocean.

Frogs invest in cognitive capacity to avoid predators—up until there are too many hungry snakes around for the evolutionary strategy to pay off.

Parts of Southeast Asia where human and bat population densities are highest could be infection hotspots, a study finds.

A study finds that not only did aquatic bacteria thrive when chemicals washed from degrading plastic were introduced into lake water, they also broke down organic matter more efficiently.

A study traces the effects of a mite outbreak from the earth to the heavens.

The Scientist speaks with Trier University’s Henrik Krehenwinkel, whose group recently detected traces of hundreds of arthropod species from a sample of dried plants—in this case, the contents of a tea bag.

Off the western Australian coast, in Shark Bay, a field of seagrass big enough to cover Washington, DC, has flourished for more than four millennia, a new study finds.