Biodiversity

Cross-posted from "Researchers discover new ocean predator in the Atacama Trench" by @skrlet13@feddit.cl in !chile@feddit.cl

I know this sub is about biodiversity but that is the mindblowing thing, the incredible diversity of minerals on earth (and my oh my the diversity is overwhelming) is a consequence of the incredible biodiversity of life, and it is not unlikely that it worked the other way too, a diversity of minerals may have been a formative part of the development of life.

Five Hawaiian crows on Wednesday were released on Maui for the first time as part of an ongoing effort to return the species to its home, conservationists said.

In the border region between Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso lies a network of protected areas that form one of the largest intact wildernesses in West Africa. The W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) Complex is a mosaic of gallery forests, savannas and riparian habitats, and the last refuge for many of the region’s most iconic species, including West African lions (Panthera leo leo), savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) and cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus).

Giant Canada geese, so ubiquitous today in cities across the country, were once considered extinct. What can we learn from watching them up close?

The largest animal on Earth is thought to be the blue whale, but these strange sea creatures can grow even longer — reaching up to 150 feet (46 meters) in length.

Full Article from NPR

A full bag of Cheetos, discarded by a subterranean visitor to the Big Room in Carlsbad Caverns national park in New Mexico, has led the US National Park Service to issue a warning that discarded food could have a “huge impact” on the cave’s delicate and at-risk ecosystem.

I see this was talked about a few months back in a different article here, but it looks paywalled.

A tiny native rodent that was on the brink of extinction on the mainland has bounced back in the most unlikely of places — an island infested with death adders and tiger snakes.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: The country’s conservation agency said Monday a creature that washed up on a South Island beach this month is believed to be a spade-toothed whale. Only six other spade-toothed whales have ever been pinpointed, and those found intact on New Zealand’s North Island beaches were buried before DNA testing could verify their identification, Hendriks said, thwarting any chance to study them. This time, the beached whale was quickly transported to cold storage and researchers will work with local Māori iwi (tribes) to plan how it will be examined, the conservation agency said. In April, Pacific Indigenous leaders signed a treaty recognizing whales as “legal persons,” although such a declaration is not reflected in the laws of participating nations. It took “many years and a mammoth amount of effort by researchers and local people” to identify the “incredibly cryptic” mammals, Kirsten Young, a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter who has studied spade-toothed whales, said in emailed remarks. Firstly mistaken for one of New Zealand’s 13 other more common types of beaked whale, tissue samples — taken before they were buried — later revealed them as the enigmatic species. The original article contains 604 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 69%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: The portal’s mouth — a furrowed pit about half a mile wide — spirals 1,250 feet into the ground, expos­ing a marbled mosaic of young and ancient rock: gray bands of basalt, milky veins of quartz and shimmering con­stellations of gold. At some point not long after our planet’s genesis, in some warm, wet pocket with the right chemistry and an adequate flow of free energy — a hot spring, an impact crater, a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor — bits of Earth rearranged themselves into the first self-replicating entities, which eventually evolved into cells. This deluge is partly a consequence of geographic serendipity: Intense equa­torial sunlight speeds the evaporation of water from sea and land to sky, trade winds bring moisture from the ocean and bordering moun­tains force incoming air to rise, cool and condense. Nearly two and a half billion years ago, photosynthetic ocean microbes called cyanobacteria permanently altered the planet, suffus­ing the atmosphere with oxygen, imbuing the sky with its familiar blue hue and initiating the formation of the ozone layer, which pro­tected new waves of life from harmful exposure to ultraviolet radia­tion. Conceived by the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock in the 1960s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the animate and inanimate elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.” The tunnels and chambers were decorated with strange and beautiful formations: massive chandeliers of frostlike gyp­sum, lemon-yellow sulfur pods, pearly balloons of hydromagnesite, transparent selenite spears and calcite lily pads hovering over turquoise pools. The original article contains 5,966 words, the summary contains 282 words. Saved 95%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: While Matt Damon relied on potatoes cultivated in crew biowaste to survive in the hit film The Martian, researchers say it is a humble desert moss that might prove pivotal to establishing life on Mars. “The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonisation using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions,” the team write. Dr Agata Zupanska, of the SETI Institute, agreed, noting moss could help enrich and transform the rocky material found on the surface of Mars to enable other plants grow. Writing in the journal The Innovation, researchers in China describe how the desert moss not only survived but rapidly recovered from almost complete dehydration. “Looking to the future, we expect that this promising moss could be brought to Mars or the moon to further test the possibility of plant colonisation and growth in outer space,” the researchers write. Dr Wieger Wamelink of Wageningen University, also raised concerns, including that temperatures on the red planet rarely get above freezing, making outdoor plant growth impossible, while the new study did not use Mars-like soil. The original article contains 714 words, the summary contains 182 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Without paywall: https://archive.ph/SJGvM

I had been holding into this article I wrote for a while now, looking for the right place to share it, and it was recommended that I share it here.

One of its favorite prey is the Arizona bark scorpion (Centruroides sculpturatus) — whose venom is potent enough to kill humans.

My spotify has turned into nature noisebox. I swear by nature recordings for focus with ADHD.

Plants react to and communicate with their environment in sometimes surprising ways that enhance their survival in changing conditions. Does this constitute intelligence? Can you have intelligence without a brain? What do we owe plants? Maybe a little overlong and meandering but important piece. It's a decade old so I wonder how the research has developed since then.

Naturalists have found a very rare type of truffle living in a Scottish forestry plantation which is being cut down so a natural Atlantic rainforest can grow in its place.

The tiny moles are covered in silky, golden fur and spend very little time above ground, although they do occasionally surface in wet and cool weather, according to Animal Diversity Web. But, the majority of the time, these tubular-shaped marsupials move through the sand up to 8.2 feet (2.5 meters) below the surface using their heads and excavator-like clawed hands.

While the impacts of black (Rattus rattus) and brown (Rattus norvegicus) rats on human society are well documented—including the spread of disease, broad-scale environmental destruction, and billions spent annually on animal control—little is known about their ecology and behavior in urban areas due to the challenges of studying animals in city environments. We use isotopic and ZooMS analysis of archaeological (1550s–1900 CE) rat remains from eastern North America to provide a large-scale framework for species arrival, interspecific competition, and dietary ecology. Brown rats arrived earlier than expected and rapidly outcompeted black rats in coastal urban areas. This replacement happened despite evidence that the two species occupy different trophic positions. Findings include the earliest molecularly confirmed brown rat in the Americas and show a deep ecological structure to how rats exploit human-structured areas, with implications for understanding urban zoonosis, rat management, and ecosystem planning as well as broader themes of rat dispersal, phylogeny, evolutionary ecology, and climate impacts.

Over the next four years, the oVert team will CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens from U.S. museum collections, producing high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.