Recreational fishing is a pastime in which people have come to expect the fish they want in the places they happen to want them. That is, they want their fish stocked and ready to catch, even in places those fish never originally lived. This practice can seem harmless, or even beneficial. But the introduction of one “beneficial” species in Yellowstone National Park suggests how rejiggering the natural world for human convenience can cause ecological disaster for almost everything else.

Nature is in more trouble now than at any other time in human history, with extinction looming over one million species of plants and animals, scientists said Monday in the UN's first comprehensive report on biodiversity.

One million animal and plant species are at imminent risk of extinction due to humankind’s relentless pursuit of economic growth, scientists said on Monday in a landmark report on the devastating impact of modern civilization on the natural world.

A previously extinct species of bird has re-evolved back into existence, according to a new study. The Aldabra rail first went extinct around 136,000 years ago. Now, it's reclaimed its home island. According to a study published Wednesday in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, a peer-reviewed scientific journal, sediments from the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean show that the island has been completely submerged multiple times, wiping out all species inhabiting it.

Long gone from their home in San Francisco, the California pipevine swallowtail is back thanks to one man transforming his yard into a habitat for them. The iridescent blue wings of the California pipevine swallowtail are considered by collectors to be among the most magnificent in North America.

A dire United Nations report, based on thousands of scientific studies, paints an urgent picture of biodiversity loss and finds that climate change is amplifying the danger to humanity.

In order to avoid males of the species bothering them for sex, female dragonflies fake their own deaths, falling from the sky and lying motionless on the ground until the suitor goes away. A study by Rassim Khelifa, a zoologist from the University of Zurich is the first time scientists have seen odonates feign death as a tactic to avoid mating, and a rare instance of animals faking their own deaths for this purpose. Odonates is the order of carnivorous insects that includes dragonflies and damselflies.

A frog-killing fungus is responsible for the decline of more species than any other pathogen on record, a global analysis has found. The study, published on 28 March in Science1, reveals that chytrid fungi have caused the decline of at least 501 amphibian species worldwide from 1965 to 2015, including 90 that have become extinct. Other well-known pathogens such as the bat disease white-nose syndrome or West Nile virus, which kills birds, have affected just a fraction of the number of species. Chytrid fungi’s impact on biodiversity is comparable to those of the most destructive invasive species, such as cats and rodents, says the study.

In 1864, our understanding of what it means to be human changed when Neanderthals were identified as a distinct species of hominin. At the time, it was immensely scandalous to presume Homo sapiens weren’t uniquely human; now it’s obvious that we are one of many. On Thursday, scientists report in Cell that it may be time to add another member to our list of ancient kin.

Tropical forests that regrow on abandoned agricultural land contain within a few decennia already most of the species of the original old-growth forest. Within 20 years the species richness is already 80% of that of old-growth forests. Their species composition, however, is totally different. Tree species are different, as well as their abundances, a team of around 80 researchers writes in Science Advances.

Scientists investigating the possible effects of climate change have predicted it would take 10 million years for the diversity of species on our planet to recover after a mass extinction event. The authors of the paper published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution wanted to calculate how long it takes for the Earth to return to former levels of biodiversity following a mass extinction event. “Humanity is undeniably causing elevated rates of biodiversity loss through climate change, habitat destruction, invasive species introduction, and so on,” the authors warned in their study.

Governments around the world are being urged by a United Nations expert to fulfil their human rights obligations to protect the world’s irreplaceable plants and animals. Speaking ahead of World Wildlife Day on Friday 3 March, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, John H. Knox, said: “The rapid loss of biological diversity around the world should be setting off alarm bells. “We are well on our way to the sixth global extinction of species in the history of the planet...

Biodiversity refers to the variety of all living things on Earth, but people often have very specific ideas of what it means. If you run an online search for images of biodiversity, you are likely to find lots of photos of tropical rainforests and coral reefs. Those ecosystems are invaluable, but biodiversity also exists in many other places. More than half of the people on Earth live in cities, and that number is growing, so it is especially important to understand how biodiversity patterns occur in our man-made environments.

Ancient climate change was to blame.

Hunting animals that stand out from the crowd because of their impressive horns or lustrous manes could lead to extinction, according to a study. Research predicts that removing even 5% of high-quality males risks wiping out the entire population, for species under stress in a changing world. Animals prized by trophy hunters for their horns, antlers or tusks usually have the best genes, say UK scientists.

By 2030, the world is expected to add another billion people or so, bringing the total population to roughly 8.5 billion. And with humans becoming increasingly urban, sprawl will only get worse, taking up precious space that wild birds, mammals, plants, and the like can still call home.

Climate change will become a steadily bigger threat to biodiversity by 2050, adding to damage from pollution and forest clearance to make way for agriculture, according to more than 550 experts in a set of reports approved by 129 governments. “Biodiversity, the essential variety of life-forms on earth, continues to decline in every region of the world,” the authors wrote after talks in Colombia. “This alarming trend endangers the quality of life of people everywhere.”

Humans are destroying the natural world at an alarming and unsustainable rate, according to four landmark U.N. reports presented at a meeting of scientists in Medellín, Colombia, on Friday. This devastation and the decline of biodiversity—the variety of plant and animal life—is so severe, that it is endangering economies, livelihoods, food security, access to drinking water, and the general quality of life of people around the world.

The world has lost 87 per cent of its wetlands in the past 300 years, says a study on land degradation released at the sixth plenary session of Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) in Colombia on Monday (March 26).

It sports a green mohican, fleshy finger-like growths under its chin and can breathe through its genitals. The Mary river turtle is one of the most striking creatures on the planet, and it is also one of the most endangered. The 40cm long turtle, which is only found on the Mary river in Queensland, features in a new list of the most vulnerable reptile species compiled by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

In 2014, a toxic invasive species—the Asian common toad—was spotted in Madagascar’s largest seaport. Conservation biologists quickly sounded an urgent alarm, warning that the invader could devastate the African island’s unique biodiversity, which includes lemurs and hundreds of other animals found nowhere else in the world.

In a southwest Louisiana crawfish pond, two endangered whooping crane chicks peck about for crawfish, insects, plants and other food. They're only 2 months old, but they dwarf the full-grown great egrets nearby. Their tall white parents bugle alarm at an ATV and people across the pond, and all four cranes move farther away.

A global biodiversity collapse is imminent unless we take urgent, concerted action to reverse species loss in the tropics, according to a major scientific study in the prestigious journal Nature.  

A fruit bowl favourite and a staple food to millions, the banana is under threat from a formidable foe

After roaming Europe and Asia for more than a hundred thousand years, cave bears died out some 24,000 years ago, after a millennia-long death spiral possibly spurred by hunting, natural climate change, and competition with humans for habitat.

More isolated oceanic islands harbor fewer native species due to the fact that plants and animals are less capable of naturally dispersing to and colonizing those islands. This is known as the species-isolation relationship (SIR), one of the most fundamental concepts in the study of island biogeography.

Considered by many to be the least fish-like of fishes, swamp eels are a real oddity and rarely documented. Now Museum scientists have described an entirely new species. The fish was discovered not in water but in damp soil. Museum researcher Dr Rachunliu G Kamei uncovered it while searching the rainforest for an entirely different group of animal, the legless amphibians called caecilians.

Most churches are focused on heaven, but in Poland, they seem to be providing a more earthly benefit: sanctuary for dozens of species of birds. That’s what biologists found when they surveyed the properties of 101 churches and an equal number of farmsteads in villages in southern Poland. Previous research had found that farms in Eastern Europe support large numbers of different kinds of birds, providing important sanctuaries for the species in areas where their more natural habitat was lost.

The Age of Humans

Life on earth is being wiped out by humans living beyond the planet's means, according to conservation organisation WWF. Their latest global report claims wildlife is dying out faster than ever and says nature needs international "life support". Between 1970 and 2014, 60% of all animals with a backbone - fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals - were wiped out by human appetites and activity, the report says.

Rapid global warming caused the largest extinction event in the Earth’s history, which wiped out the vast majority of marine and terrestrial animals on the planet, scientists have found. The mass extinction, known as the “great dying”, occurred around 252m years ago and marked the end of the Permian geologic period. The study of sediments and fossilized creatures show the event was the single greatest calamity ever to befall life on Earth, eclipsing even the extinction of the dinosaurs 65m years ago.

With around 23 billion chickens on the planet at any one time, the bird is a symbol of our times, say scientists.

Lexus shocked the automotive world in Detroit three years ago with the debut of the LC coupe. It was a testament to the brand’s new sense of creative ambition, but it was only just the beginning. Since then, the Lexus design team has been exploring the brand’s evolution and the latest result of those explorations will make its debut at the 2019 North American International Auto Show with the world premiere of the Lexus LC Convertible Concept.

The tidy rows of gleaming solar panels at Pine Gate Renewables facility in southwestern Oregon originally sat amid the squat grasses of a former cattle pasture. But in 2017 the company started sowing the 41-acre site with a colorful riot of native wildflowers. The shift was not merely aesthetic; similar projects at a growing number of solar farms around the country aim to help reverse the worrying declines in bees, butterflies and other key pollinating species observed in recent years.

A crucial but threatened habitat has been revitalised following decades of decline after conservationists decided to run a five-tonne tractor over it. The unusual action was part of a wider effort to save the marsh clubmoss, an endangered plant that evolved 400 million years ago and forms a vital component of damp heathlands. The plant has declined by 85 per cent in recent decades as its habitat has been largely wiped out, leaving only a few sites in Dorset and Hampshire.