Conservation

Human-Driven Fires Have Shaped The Amazonian Forest For Over 10,000 Years

Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators, Wildlife / /

New research is dismantling the long-standing myth of the “pristine” Amazon. A reconstruction of 10,000 years of Amazonian pyrogeography, based on 1,361 radiocarbon (¹⁴C) dates across 303 sites – including soil charcoal and burned archaeological material – shows that fire in the rainforest is almost exclusively a human-driven phenomenon, not a natural one. Over the

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New “devil flower” species discovered in Thai national park

Birds, Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators, Wildlife / /

Researchers have described a new species of leafless flowering plant found on the forest floor of a national park in western Thailand, and its otherworldly appearance has earned it a fittingly dramatic name: Thismia daemona, the “devil flower”. The species belongs to Thismia, a genus of small plants sometimes called “fairy lanterns”. Unlike most plants,

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A honey bee colony does not follow a calendar. Should its model?

Birds, Conservation, Nature, Plants, Pollinators / /

Guest blog post by Dominik Lammers Models help us ask a deceptively simple question: if the world works in a particular way, what should we expect to happen? For honey bee colonies, answering that question is difficult. A colony’s development depends on food, weather, disease, the surrounding landscape, and the behaviour of thousands of individual

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Vivid orange killifish discovered in the Brazilian Amazon

Birds, Conservation, Nature, Wildlife / /

Researchers have described a new species of brilliantly coloured fish from a network of forest streams in the Brazilian Amazon, and have already recommended it for listing as Endangered because of the pressures facing its only known home. The fish, named Laimosemion laranja, is a killifish measuring less than three centimeters in standard length. Males

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