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Imagine trying to tell identical twins apart just by looking at their fingerprints. That's how challenging it can be for scientists to distinguish the tiny powdery pollen grains produced by fir, spruce and pine trees.

Before they can fight to survive, some endangered songbirds are losing their groove and being robbed of their chance at love—all because of what's in their food.

Relief may be in sight for kākāpō affected by an extremely painful disease, thanks to a University of Otago—Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka-led study.

Results from a long-term field experiment shed new light on how grasslands can be restored for nature, the environment, and for farmers.

As urban development continues to creep further into Earth's oldest and most diverse rainforests, a Swansea University-led study reveals native and invasive small mammals aren't just adapting to their changing habitats—they may also be sharing their microbes.

Marine habitats are facing unprecedented threats, with 66% of coastal areas already altered and degraded. Bottom-contact fisheries, which use indiscriminate trawling, physically damage almost 5 million square kilometers of the seafloor each year.

Animal research on biomusicality, which looks at whether different species are capable of behaving in ways that show they recognize aspects of music, including rhythm and beat, remains a tantalizing field at the intersection of biology and psychology.

Increased vegetation growth in European mountains, driven by climate and land-use changes, reduces the genetic diversity of medicinal plants, suggests a new study using satellite data and genetic analyses on Greek mountain tea.

New research led by Monterey Bay Aquarium reveals a surprising ripple effect in coastal ecosystems: the collapse of one marine predator can benefit another.

Scientists at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) found that the fringe-lipped bat, known to eavesdrop on frog and toad mating calls to find its prey, learns to distinguish between palatable and unpalatable frogs and toads through experience.

Thousands of hectares of Chernobyl-affected farmland, long deemed too dangerous for cultivation in northern Ukraine can safely return to production, according to new research.

Although many conservationists believe biodiversity is intrinsically valuable, the protection of biodiversity has also been argued for on the basis that diversity makes ecosystems healthier and more stable. But are highly diverse ecosystems more stable and productive than ecosystems with low diversity?

Many of the fish we eat play a key role in maintaining the seabed—and therefore our climate, new research shows. Convex Seascape Survey scientists assessed the role of fish in bioturbation (churning and reworking sediments) in shallow UK seas. Their paper, published in the journal Marine Environmental Research, is titled "A functional assessment of fish as bioturbators and their vulnerability to local extinction."

The less intensively you manage the soil, the better the soil can function; for example, not plowing as often or using more grass-clover mixtures as cover crops. These are the conclusions of a research team led by the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW).

Around the world, millions of tons of small fish are processed into fishmeal and fish oil (FMFO) each year—key ingredients in aquaculture that help farmed fish, like salmon, grow. A new University of British Columbia (UBC) study has revealed the global distribution of FMFO factories for the first time, shedding light on a critical area of the aquaculture supply chain, identifying where these ingredients...

New research led by the University of Portsmouth has revealed that African social spiders—dubbed "hippie spiders" for their cooperative lifestyle—may not have distinct personalities after all.

"Get off my lawn!" Funny as a meme but maybe scary in real life, this short sentence is synonymous with an elderly man shouting at kids whose bikes have gotten too close to a well-manicured front yard. But it could just as well represent a female bird, aggressively chasing whatever intruder gets too close to her nest.

If an experiment is repeated under similar conditions, the results should be the same. In reality, the situation is often different—scientists speak of a "reproducibility crisis," which affects different disciplines.

A study published in the journal PLOS One reveals that combining bird observation data with land cover information provides more accurate predictions of numbers of wild bee species—a metric called richness—than using either dataset alone.

Energy scarcity is a central driver of animal behavior and evolution. The amazing diversity of life on this planet is a testament to the plethora of novel biological solutions to the problem of securing and maintaining energy. However, despite being so central to biology, it remains difficult to quantify, and thereby empirically analyze, energy consumption.

In a comprehensive study conducted at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology, researchers tracked 244 wild-derived male house mice—yes, the kind you'd find in barns or basements—over their entire lives, up to 11 months, in real-world-style enclosures.

Psychologists from Durham University, UK, have observed the behavior of 90 sanctuary-living apes to establish whether bonobos were more likely than chimpanzees to comfort others in distress.

Sharks are often perceived as the ultimate beasts, an image largely imposed on them by the media. Yet, shark bites are rare—only around 100 or so happen every year, and just around 10% are fatal.

Populations of animals and plants separated by even thousands of miles can rise and fall together driven by ecological factors, a phenomenon scientists call "spatial synchrony."