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
Set out on a hike at Florida’s Tiger Creek Preserve, and it won’t be long before you see a small brown lizard scuttle through the undergrowth. And while some of them might be the ubiquitous brown anole, an introduced species from Cuba, others merit closer inspection. The dark lateral stripe along the lizard’s body might … Read more
I raised my binoculars, expecting to get a view of a mule deer. I often spotted them in this little valley, and when I saw the tan form, I knew what it was. Or thought I knew. Because as I focused on the animal, something seemed off. And then it moved. It had a long … 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
“If it doesn’t get measured, it doesn’t get managed.” If the old adage is true for business, then it’s doubly true for global fish stocks. In fact, of the more than 10,000 fisheries in the world, fewer than 440 (mostly in upper-income countries and in top-traded fish like tuna) are regularly assessed — measured — with … Read more
Tungsten trisulfide. It sounds like something straight out of Tony Stark’s fictional lab, but fortunately for the future of grid-scale energy storage, it’s very real. As described in a recent paper published in ACS Nano, researchers in Andre Taylor’s lab at Yale University, led by NatureNet Science Fellow Won-Hee Ryu, are the first to report … Read more
Update on the NatureNet Science Fellows: Won-Hee Ryu A new paper by Conservancy NatureNet Science Fellow Won-Hee Ryu may ultimately help scientists overcome one of the most intractable technological obstacles to wholesale adoption of clean energy: the development of technologies capable of storing that energy at larger and larger scales. Today rechargeable lithium-ion batteries power … Read more
Conservancy NatureNet Science Fellow Mingliang Zhang recently published a paper in Nature Nanotechnology that marks an important step toward solving one of the challenges facing scientists working on next-generation smart nanoparticle systems: the ability to precisely engineer those systems in size, shape and composition to introduce multiple functionalities that would otherwise be unattainable from a … 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