cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5260082

The governments of the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu have announced their commitment to create a massive multinational Melanesian Ocean Reserve. If implemented as envisioned, the reserve would become the world’s first Indigenous-led ocean reserve, covering an area nearly as big as the Amazon Rainforest.

Speaking at the U.N. Ocean Conference underway in Nice, France, representatives of both countries said the vision for the ocean reserve is to cover at least 6 million square kilometers (2.3 million square miles) of ocean and islands. The reserve will include the combined national waters of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea, and extend to the protected waters of New Caledonia’s exclusive economic zone. All of the island countries, largely inhabited by Indigenous Melanesians, are located in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, within the region known as Melanesia.

“The Melanesian Ocean Reserve will give the governments and peoples of Melanesia the ability to do much more to protect our ancestral waters from those who extract and exploit without concern for our planet and its living beings. We hope our Indigenous stewardship of this vast reserve will create momentum for similar initiatives all over the world,” Vanuatu’s environment minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said in a joint press release.

Melanesia is one of the world’s most biodiverse regions, hosting an incredible diversity of both land and marine species, including an estimated 75% of known coral species and more than 3,000 species of reef-associated fish.

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A single drawing from a 94-year-old scientific paper has revived interest in one of the more roundabout ways a spider preps its dinner. First swathe a fruit fly or other tidbit of prey in silk. Then throw up toxins all over it.

“I was like … what are you talking about?” says evolutionary biologist Giulia Zancolli of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland as she remembers the moment she read this detail when reviewing another lab’s scientific paper for possible publication in a journal. Tracing back the references, she eventually ended up with a drawing from a 1931 paper. “That was the only evidence we had.”

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5248565

If you could walk the ocean floor off the coast of Cape Arago in Oregon in the summer, you’d find yourself in the mysterious green depths of a forest of kelp. Look up, and you’d see sunlight filtering through the fronds waving in the current; look down, and you’d see the plants anchored to an ocean floor covered with life. But if you walked a little bit farther, you’d come to a barren clearing, no sign of kelp or much else — just a carpet of purple sea urchin, a creature that is devouring kelp at an alarming rate.

The disappearance of kelp forests is widely felt here; gray whales have changed their foraging patterns, and the red abalone fishery in Northern California closed after swarms of urchins and warming waters destroyed more than 90% of the kelp forests there. In Oregon, a 2024 study by the Oregon Kelp Alliance found that over a 12-year period, the kelp forest off the coast declined by up to 73%, primarily due to an out-of-control population of purple sea urchins, which graze on the kelp. This system is out of balance largely owing to the absence of a keystone species: xvlh-t’vsh, which means “sea otter” in the Athabaskan language of the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. For more than 20 years, the Siletz Tribe has been working to reintroduce sea otters.

Full Article (archive link)

Researchers have released new maps documenting the “Great Nile Migration,” the Earth’s largest-known land mammal migration across South Sudan and Ethiopia.

The maps chart the seasonal movements of two antelope species, the white-eared kob (Kobus kob leucotis) and the tiang (Damaliscus lunatus tiang). Every year, around 5 million white-eared kob and 400,000 tiang migrate across 100,000 square kilometers (38,612 square miles) of South Sudan’s wetlands and Ethiopia’s Gambella National Park.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Male bonobos are larger and stronger than females, so researchers have found it puzzling that the female apes enjoy high status in bonobo society. After analyzing three decades of behavioral data, researchers recently shared a study that pinpoints their source of power: female alliances and coalitions.

archived (Wayback Machine):

• Mongabay article
• research cited

To protect themselves, the curlews eavesdrop on the alarms coming from prairie dog colonies, according to research published Thursday in the journal Animal Behavior.

so far, scientists have documented only a few instances of birds eavesdropping on mammals.

"That doesn't necessarily mean it's rare in the wild," she said, "it just means we haven't studied it yet."

Some good news can't do any harm.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5204608

Just below Greenland is a menacing stretch of water known as the Cold Blob. As the planet heats up, the Cold Blob remains a spooky outlier — positioned right above the area where the Atlantic Ocean’s so-called conveyor belt is supposed to switch back and head south.

The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, or AMOC for short, comprises an enormous system of currents that carries water and nutrients across the world and plays a large part in stabilizing the global climate. For years, scientists have warned that the AMOC was slowing down, possibly nearing collapse. The Cold Blob is the most immediately visible proof of its decline, likely a result of Greenland’s melting glaciers, but research on the deep water current’s strength over recent years has varied wildly

The stakes could hardly be higher. Should the current break down, the most frightening predictions describe a world thrown into chaos: Drought could destroy India, South America, and Africa; the Eastern Seaboard of the United States would see dramatic sea level rise; and an arctic chill would spread across Europe.

Part of what makes AMOC’s behavior so hard to forecast is that consistent monitoring of the current didn’t begin until 2004, so the historical data is limited. When researchers run models to examine AMOC’s behavior in the past, they sometimes get baffling results. “The new models aren’t working for AMOC,” said David Thornalley, a paleoclimatologist at University College London, who wasn’t involved with the latest research. “Some people would say we don’t 100 percent know what AMOC did through the 20th century.”

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Now, teams of government scientists are reporting widespread coral death, which they say is the worst bleaching to hit the state. There are still areas of live coral, and some bleached coral will recover, but as scientists gather data, the scale of mortality has left many shocked.

Dr Thomas Holmes coordinates the marine science program at the WA government’s Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions. [...] “I’m not afraid to use the word unprecedented,” he says.

Archived link of the article

Thousands of tiny nematode worms can join up to form tentacle-like towers that can straddle large gaps or hitch rides on larger animals

archived (Wayback Machine)

The cave habitats of Tennessee and Kentucky have species that most will never see. Here are some of the unusual creatures found there.

A species that was hunted to local extinction made a comeback on its historical range, scientists who witnessed the population recovery via satellite imagery said.

The wolverine, listed as endangered due to over-hunting in the 20th century, has returned to the forests of southern Finland, according to a paper published last month in Ecology and Evolution.

Wolverine populations are distributed throughout boreal regions in the northern hemisphere, including arctic and subarctic regions and western North America, the Wolverine Foundation noted.

Historically, in Europe, they could be found as far south as Norway, southern Sweden and northeast Poland. Today, wolverines are only found in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia.

In Finland, the wolverine was classified as endangered in the 1980s. While they were known to have inhabited southern parts of the country as recently as the 19th century, hunting eradicated the species from the region, according to researchers at Aalto University in Espoo, Finland.

El Santuario Nacional Los Manglares de Tumbes es un área protegida del Perú que abarca una porción de la ecorregión del Golfo de Guayaquil, conocidos localmente como Manglares de Tumbes. Se sitúa en la sección más septentrional de la costa pacífica del país.

Antiguamente, estos manglares abarcaron unas 28 mil hectáreas, reduciéndose significativamente con el tiempo debido a la tala de bosques con el fin de establecer criaderos de langostinos.

Tiene una extensión de 2 972 hectáreas y fue creado el 2 de marzo de 1988 mediante decreto supremo N°018-88-AG. En el 2016 la UNESCO incluyó al Santuario Nacional Manglares de Tumbes como Zona Núcleo de la Reserva de Biósfera Noroeste Amotapes-Manglares.

Hoy en día este santuario ha adquirido su importancia dado que es única muestra representativa de mayor extensión de bosques de manglares en Perú.

Es más, no solo proporciona leña, estacas y puntales, sino que también es una barrera natural contra la erosión que producen las olas y mareas. Además, al producir una enorme cantidad de sedimentos y materia orgánica le va ganando terreno al océano.

También, como hemos dicho antes, allí se encuentran recursos que extraen los pescadores artesanales para la alimentación de la población local y constituyen un refugio para el cocodrilo de Tumbes (Crocodylus acutus) o cocodrilo americano, especie que se encuentra en vía de extinción.

Desarrollar un turismo sostenible es de vital importancia para su conservación y la de los pescadores artesanales que pueden hallar una fuente extra de ingresos y minimizar su impacto a la vez que conservan sus métodos tradicionales. Además un sector turístico fuerte y organizado sosteniblemente puede competir con las langostineras y ayudar a conservar el lugar.

The link is the handbook of birds of India and Pakistan.

There were reports of the bird being seen but this is the first time it has been confirmed.

Now there will be an article that confirms this. Should be out soon enough.

https://youtu.be/4QvMPmJF5Wg Here is a yt video of the confirmation. The man is Dr. Waseem Ahmad Khan (Ph. D. Zoology). So a reliable source. Chairman of the Pakistan wildlife foundation too.

New research finds clownfish shrink their bodies to survive warming oceans. Scientists observed some of the orange-striped fish shrank during a heat wave off the coast of Papa New Guinea.

Research suggests pollinator buzzing sounds lead plants to increase their nectar production

Get up close with the mole crab, a fascinating crustacean you can find (and catch) on your next trip to the beach.