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Recording of humpback whale from 1949 could also provide new understanding of how the huge animals communicate
A haunting whale song discovered on decades-old audio equipment could open up a new understanding of how the huge animals communicate, according to researchers who say it is the oldest such recording known.
The song is that of a humpback whale, a marine giant beloved by whale watchers for its docile nature and spectacular leaps from the water, and was recorded by scientists in March 1949 in Bermuda, said researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Falmouth, Massachusetts.
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Her research popularised the idea of the wood wide web, but the scientific backlash was brutal. As the author of The Mother Tree returns to the forest in a new book, she discusses her battle to reimagine our relationship with nature
In 2018, the ecologist and writer Suzanne Simard was conducting research in the forested Caribou Mountains of western Canada when a thunderstorm rolled in. She was with her two teenage daughters and her close friend and colleague, Jean Roach. They saw flashes of lightning, heard a loud rumble and then they smelled smoke. They were forced to run the half kilometre back to Simard’s truck as the trees behind them caught alight and the air grew thick. As they ran, animals burst out of the forest: a deer, a rabbit, a grey wolf. They reached the truck with no time to spare, all four of them covered in soot and dirt. Overhead, helicopters began circling the orange-black air, dropping water on the flames below.
Wildfires have become an ever bigger problem in Canada. The 2018 wildfires were the biggest in British Columbia’s history, but this record was broken in 2021, and then again in 2023, when fires consumed an area three times the size of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia and the smoke travelled as far as New York City. The cause is not only global heating, which has brought hotter, dryer summers, but also the changing makeup of the forest. When logging companies clear forest, they replant it with fast-growing conifer species, but these trees are much more flammable than Canada’s diverse, native forest.
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Caistor St Edmund, Norfolk: Deworming horses is as important as ever, but not at the expense of dung beetles – which are coming out of hibernation now
I slide a medical spatula into George the Connemara pony’s mouth, carefully finding the interdental gap in his teeth after his incisors. He begins licking and chewing, working out if it is edible. My job is to hold it in place for at least 30 seconds to get a good sample of his saliva on the absorbent swab, which will be analysed to see if his antibodies indicate a burden of tapeworms.
Back a decade or two, deworming horses was a routine three-monthly job in the horse-care calendar. But resistance to wormers has increased and there is growing understanding of the impact on the environment. Deworming should be targeted so that horses are only wormed if needed.
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Hedgehogs’ habitat is shrinking, they’re vulnerable to cars, and pesticides are affecting their food supply. Here’s how we can help them pull through
With stumpy, speedy legs, questing snouts and a fierce quiver of needles, hedgehogs are enchantingly strange, like fantasy creatures from a medieval bestiary. “It’s the nation’s favourite wild animal – every time there’s a vote or a poll, the hedgehog wins,” says ecologist Hugh Warwick, AKA “Hedgehog Hugh”, author of the Cull of the Wild and hedgehog champion.
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Colossal Biosciences’ CEO says its work follows a ‘moral obligation’ while critics say it’s ‘tech bro’ hype that could undermine conservation
Can and should we resurrect animal species that have been extinct for thousands of years? Such weighty, existential questions were once the preserve of science fiction but are now being played out within an unassuming brick building in a Dallas business park.
Colossal Biosciences, valued at $10.2bn after raising hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from investors including celebrities spanning from Tiger Woods to Paris Hilton, has provoked a stampede of acclaim as well as denunciation after announcing last year it had made the dire wolf, a species lost from the world for more than 10,000 years, “de-extinct” via the birth of three new pups.
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The Quapaw Nation is the only US Native community to carry out a cleanup of one of the country’s worst sites of environmental contamination
They call this land the Laue. In the late 1800s, part of these 200 acres of grassland inside the Quapaw Nation were allotted to tribal citizen Charley Quapaw Blackhawk. After forcing dozens of tribes into Indian territory before the civil war, the US government then parceled out reservations and property to individual members. It was part of the government’s attempt to “civilize” Native Americans by turning them into private, not communal,landholders and yeoman farmers in the model of Thomas Jefferson’s ideal citizen.
Yet, for the last century, little grew on the Laue. Half of it was buried beneath towering mounds of toxic rock known as chat piles. The waste rock, laced with chemicals, was left after miners extracted millions of tons of lead and zinc from the Tri-State Mining District, where the valuable ores stretched across Kansas, Missouri and Oklahomabetween 1891 and the 1970s. By 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had designated 40 sq miles that include nearly all the Quapaw Nation as the Tar Creek Superfund site, joining the EPA’s list of the most contaminated places in the country. Informally called a “megasite”, Tar Creek remains one of the largest and most complex environmental disasters in the country.
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Review from non-profit finds range of scenarios of firms simultaneously lobbying for and against Pfas regulations
Some top US lobbying firms are simultaneously working both sides of the Pfas “forever chemicals” issue, raising serious conflict of interest questions and concerns that their activity is slowing states’ efforts to rein in the public health threat.
The review of six states’ lobbying records conducted by the non-profit F-Minus found a range of scenarios in which firms lobbied both sides. Most common Pfas are linked to cancer. The lobbying firm Holland & Knight works for the American Chemistry Council, which represents the nation’s largest Pfas makers, and aggressively opposes most regulations. Simultaneously, Holland & Knight lobbies for the American Cancer Society.
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The Trump administration’s cuts to biodiversity funding have imperiled species, habitats and the people who defend both. Now the world is seeking a new way forward
On 22 January 2024, at the inauguration of the current Liberian president, Joseph Boakai, the US-based Liberian poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley paid tribute to the west African nation’s tropical forests – one of the places where, she said, “our fathers came / centuries ago, and planted our umbilical cords / deep in the soil”.
The forests of Liberia are among the most diverse on the planet, home not only to humans and their ancestral ties but also to rare species such as forest elephants, pygmy hippopotamuses and western chimpanzees. They are also chronically threatened by industrial development, including illegal logging and mining.
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Mohammed Ahmed Sayed Mohammed is among those redeploying his skills for a local recycling company that is cleaning up the Nile
At 6am, Mohammed Ahmed Sayed Mohammed steers his boat from al-Qarsaya island through Cairo’s Nile waters towards the capital’s riverside clubs. Fifteen years ago, he searched for fish. Now he hunts plastic bottles.
“The fish fled from the plastic chokehold,” said Sayed, who has lived on the Giza island since arriving from Assiut, further south on the Nile, as a 14-year-old fishing apprentice. He never returned to his village, marrying locally and raising three children who now live alongside him with their 12 grandchildren on the island housing 200 families.
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As the QuitGPT movement gains momentum, should people concerned about the environmental impacts of AI consider opting out?
Change by degrees offers life hacks and sustainable living tips each Saturday to help reduce your household’s carbon footprint
Got a question or tip for reducing household emissions? Email us at changebydegrees@theguardian.com
It’s only a few years on from the release of ChatGPT but the race to plug artificial intelligence into everything has sparked a surge in datacentres, with escalating environmental costs.
Globally, datacentre power demand is growing four times faster than all other sectors, according to the International Energy Agency, and is on track to exceed Japan’s electricity use by 2030.
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