admin Longline fisheries are a well-recognized risk to sea turtles. However a brand new research finds that native, small-scale fisheries trigger considerably larger mortality, harvesting as much as 97% of the ~12,000 turtles killed every year within the Solomon Islands. The Gist Researchers estimate the size of turtle catches in two Solomon Islands fisheries: an area, … Read more
Nearly all migratory birds migrate first, then nest once they arrive where they’re going. To do otherwise would be counter-intuitive, a process requiring a tremendous amount of energy all at once. But the American woodcock—a migratory shorebird found in the eastern United States—may do just that. Known as itinerant breeding, it’s a behavior so rare … Read more
About 20,000 years ago, somewhere along the crease where the Cascade Mountains drop into the plains, black-tailed jackrabbits and snowshoe hares mated. But as snowshoe hares, with their unique ability to seasonally change from brown to white, bounded away, they took with them a black-tailed jackrabbit gene, one that would serve them well millennia later: … Read more
It’s not every day that a young female scientist is honored alongside David Attenborough and E. O. Wilson. But that’s exactly what happened to TNC scientist Suzana Bandeira, who earlier this year was immortalized in Linnean binomial when a new Angolan skink species was named in her honor. “It’s such an honor,” says Bandeira, speaking … Read more
Lizzie McLeod laughs at the memory: She’s rushing from her job at a local bank to The Nature Conservancy’s office in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. There, she’d spend her lunch hour in a dark room/closet scanning a marine biologist’s old slides to digital. McLeod, now The Nature Conservancy’s Global Director for Oceans, has fond memories of those … Read more
New Fish Tech to Help Manage Fisheries for Sustainability Gets a Greenlight These days, most headlines about the world’s fisheries are heavy on a vocabulary of loss and resignation. There’s overfishing, illegal fishing and the problems of bycatch. Then there are the results of those activities—collapsing fisheries, broken communities, lost livelihoods, poor nutrition and destruction … Read more
Published in Marine Policy, a new paper from TNC staff and partners provides the first national review of the structure and function of community fisheries trusts in the U.S., as well as one of the first examples of guidance for the development and operation of such trusts in new geographies and fisheries. The Gist Fisheries … Read more
I walked along a little path when suddenly the ground in front of me came alive in a whir of feathers. I reflexively jumped back as 20 California quail flushed before me. They flew rapidly away for a short distance, then set their wings as they glided into a patch of grass. Just as they … Read more
Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez has a new favorite flower in her South Florida garden. She’s looking at it as she explains her research process for the dissertation she recently defended at Florida International University in Miami. She describes the bold blooms with something close to awe. “I have gravitated toward the golden ones,” says Jazmin Locke-Rodriguez, Florida … Read more
The ongoing transformation of the U.S.’s energy systems—from a centralized system of fossil fuel plants to a distributed one with large- and small-scale renewable energy projects—creates a compelling opportunity to build the energy infrastructure of the future in partnership with local and historically excluded communities. The Gist The study, Empowering Communities with Solar, led by … Read more