Scientists Are Inching Closer to Bringing Back the Woolly Mammoth

De-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the woolly mammoth. Well, not the woolly mammoth exactly, but an Asian elephant gene-edited to give it the fuzzy hair and layer of blubber that allowed its close relative to thrive in sub-zero environments. To get to these so-called “functional mammoths,” Colossal’s scientists need to solve a … Read more

California Is Solving Its Water Problems by Flooding Its Best Farmland

“I remember taking so many tours out there,” said Rentner, “and all the public funding agency partners would go, ‘OK, so you have a million dollars in hand, and you still need how many? How are you going to get there?’” “I don’t know,” Rentner told them in response. “We’re just gonna keep writing proposals, … Read more

Cicadas Are So Loud, Fiber Optic Cables Can ‘Hear’ Them

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 up tiny perturbations in that … Read more

As Mexico marks conservation day, advocates say it takes too long to list vulnerable species

MEXICO CITY — Residents of Mexico’s Caribbean reef island of Banco Chinchorro near Belize have hunted the meat and salmon-pink shells of queen conch for generations. As populations have shrunk in recent decades, Mexico has enforced limits and bans on catching the shellfish. The species has continued to decline despite these measures, which included a … Read more

California’s Giant Sequoias Are in Big Trouble

According to Blom, whose group favors thinning dense stands of young trees and reducing accumulations of vegetation and woody debris from the forest floor through prescribed burns or mechanical methods, there are about 26,000 acres of land to be cleared in all 80 sequoia groves on federal land, with some 8,000 acres already treated. On … Read more

Scientists Have Been Freezing Corals for Decades. Now They’re Learning How to Wake Them Up

This story originally appeared in Hakai and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Arah Narida leans over a microscope to gaze into a plastic petri dish containing a hood coral. The animal—a pebbled blue-white disk roughly half the size of a pencil eraser—is a marvel. Just three weeks ago, the coral was smaller than … Read more

The Fight Against the Smallmouth Bass Invasion of the Grand Canyon

Today, however, four of those fish—the humpback chub, the Colorado pikeminnow, the razorback sucker, and the bonytail—are federally listed as threatened or endangered. Lake Powell commandeered the Colorado’s payloads of silt and stymied natural floods, erasing channels and backwaters where chubs and suckers once spawned and reared. And smallmouth bass and other invasive species devastated … Read more

Why Scientists Are Bugging the Rainforest

Bioacoustics can’t fully replace ecology fieldwork, but can provide reams of data that would be extremely expensive to collect by merely sending scientists to remote areas for long stretches of time. With bioacoustic instruments, researchers must return to collect the data and swap batteries, but otherwise the technology can work uninterrupted for years. “Scaling sampling … Read more

Abandoned Farms Are a Hidden Resource for Restoring Biodiversity

Southern Europe is not so different. Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal never had collective farms, but the inexorable aging of their populations and the exodus of young people to cities is emptying villages and leaving fields and pastures untended. Francesco Cherubini of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology calculates that in the past three … Read more

Conservation group to help expand protection of the endangered vaquita porpoise

MEXICO CITY — The conservation group Sea Shepherd on Tuesday signed an agreement with Mexico to help expand the protection area for the vaquita porpoise, the world’s most endangered marine mammal. Sea Shepherd, which helps the Mexican Navy to remove illegal gill nets that drown the vaquita, says the expansion will extend the area where … Read more