Ants in your house? Here’s how they get everywhere – even high up in tall buildings

Windy Soemara/Shutterstock Tanya Latty, University of SydneyAnts are among nature’s greatest success stories, with an estimated 22,000 species worldwide. Tropical Australia in particular is a global hotspot for ant diversity. Some researchers believe it could hold some of the richest ant biodiversity on the planet, with an estimated 5,000 species in the tropics alone. But if ants are so successful out in nature, why do they so often turn up in our homes and even upper-level apartments? And what can we do to keep them out? There’s probably an ant near you right now Ants dominate the planet in terms of sheer abundance. At any given moment, there are an estimated 20 quadrillion ants alive — that’s 20 followed by 15 zeros. In fact, for every human being, there are roughly 2.5 million ants. There are about 22,000 ant species worldwide. This one is called the Green tree ant (Oecophylla smaragdina). Tanya LattySo the short answer to “Why are there ants in my house?” is simply this: there are a lot of ants. We live on a planet where ants outnumber us by an almost unimaginable margin. The fact that a few occasionally wander into our homes shouldn’t come as a surprise. Ants work from home (yours, that is) Ants owe much of their success to their highly social nature. Within the colony, some individuals (female queens...

Read More........→March 28, 2025

South Africa Bans Commercial Fishing at Penguin Breeding Spots Where Food Supply Shortage Could Drive Extinction

African penguins on a Cape Coast beach – credit S Martin, CC 2.0., via FlickrFor a critically endangered species of penguin, a recent decision to remove fishing competition from its hunting and breeding grounds may prove to be the key to saving it.In the rich waters of South Africa’s cape and Atlantic coastlines, 6 key breeding colonies of the African penguin are now no-go zones for commercial sardine and anchovy harvesting, according to a recent court order.Less than 10,000 breeding pairs of this penguin survive, and conservation groups hailed the court’s decision that will protect the colony’s feeding areas for at least a decade.“This order of court is a historic victory in the ongoing battle to save the critically endangered African Penguin from extinction in the wild,” said BirdLife South Africa, one of the groups that had called for the protection.The protected areas include Robben Island where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years. Dassen Island, further up South Africa’s Atlantic coast, and the Stony Point Nature Reserve, make up two of the other 6 areas in total where penguin protections are kicking in.The court’s decision followed weeks of “exceptionally hard work and negotiations between the conservation NGOs and the commercial sardine and anchovy fishing industry,” according to SANCCOB, one of those very NGOs.“This...

Read More........→March 27, 2025

Curious Kids: what was the biggest dinosaur that ever lived?

Getty Images Nic Rawlence, University of OtagoWhat actually was the biggest dinosaur? – Zavier, 14, Tauranga, New Zealand. Great question Zavier, and one that palaeontologists (scientists who study fossil animals and plants) are interested in all around the world. And let’s face it, kids of all ages (and I include adults here) are fascinated by dinosaurs that break records for the biggest, the longest, the scariest or the fastest. It’s why, to this day, one of most famous dinosaurs is still Tyranosaurus rex, the tyrant king. These record-breaking dinosaurs are part of the reason why the Jurassic Park movie franchise has been so successful. Just think of the scene where Dr Alan Grant (played by New Zealand actor Sam Neill) is stunned by the giant sauropod dinosaur rearing up to reach the highest leaves in the tree with its long neck. But how do scientists work out how big and heavy a dinosaur was? And what were the biggest dinosaurs that ever lived? Calculating dinosaur size In an ideal world, calculating how big a dinosaur was would be easy – with a nearly complete skeleton. Standing next to the remarkable Triceratops skeleton on permanent display at Melbourne Museum makes you realise how gigantic and formidable these creatures were. By measuring bone proportions (such as length,...

Read More........→March 19, 2025

DNA detectives in Antarctica: probing 6,000 years of penguin poo for clues to the past

Jamie Wood Jamie Wood, University of Adelaide and Theresa Cole, University of AdelaideStudies of ancient DNA have tended to focus on frozen land in the northern hemisphere, where woolly mammoths and bison roamed. Meanwhile, Antarctica has received relatively little attention. We set out to change that. The most suitable sediments are exposed near the coast of the icy continent, where penguins like to breed. Their poo is a rich source of DNA, providing information about the health of the population as well as what penguins have been eating. Our new research opens a window on the past of Adélie penguins in Antarctica, going back 6,000 years. It also offers a surprise glimpse into the shrinking world of southern elephant seals over the past 1,000 years. Understanding how these species coped with climate change in the past can help us prepare for the future. Wildlife in Antarctica faces multiple emerging threats and will likely need support to cope with the many challenges ahead. A unique marine ecosystem Adélie penguins are particularly sensitive to changes in their environment. This makes them what we call a “sentinel species”, providing an early warning of imbalance or dysfunction in the coastal ecosystem. Their poo also provides a record of how they responded to changes in the past. In our new research, we excavated...

Read More........→March 11, 2025

Woolly mice are cute and impressive – but they won’t bring back mammoths or save endangered species

Colossal Biosciences Emily Roycroft, Monash UniversityUS company Colossal Biosciences has announced the creation of a “woolly mouse” — a laboratory mouse with a series of genetic modifications that lead to a woolly coat. The company claims this is the first step toward “de-extincting” the woolly mammoth. The successful genetic modification of a laboratory mouse is a testament to the progress science has made in understanding gene function, developmental biology and genome editing. But does a woolly mouse really teach us anything about the woolly mammoth? What has been genetically modified? Woolly mammoths were cold-adapted members of the elephant family, which disappeared from mainland Siberia at the end of the last Ice Age around 10,000 years ago. The last surviving population, on Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean, went extinct about 4,000 years ago. The house mouse (Mus musculus) is a far more familiar creature, which most of us know as a kitchen pest. It is also one of the most studied organisms in biology and medical research. We know more about this laboratory mouse than perhaps any other mammal besides humans. Colossal details its new research in a pre-print paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed. According to the paper, the researchers disrupted the normal function of seven different genes in laboratory mice...

Read More........→March 10, 2025

World’s Oldest Bird Gives Birth to Yet Another Chick–at Nearly 74 Years Old

Wisdom – USFWS / SWNSThe world’s oldest known bird has returned to her home island to hatch yet another chick, at nearly 74 years old.Named Wisdom, the Laysan albatross has been spotted this month caring for her youngster on Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge in the Pacific Ocean.Like others of her species, Wisdom returns to the same nesting site each year to reunite with her mate and if able, lay one egg.For decades, park officials in the Hawaiian Archipelago observed Wisdom doing this with the same partner (named Akeakamai), but that bird has not been seen for several years, which caused Wisdom to begin courtship dances with other males last year.The spry septuagenarian is estimated to have produced 50-60 eggs in her lifetime, successfully fledging as many as 30 chicks, according to the expert staff at the refuge 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu.Albatross parents share the responsibility of feeding their young by taking turns hunting while the other stays at the nest to watch over the chick.“So when Wisdom returns to the nest (it’s) her partner’s turn to go hunt for squid, fish and crustaceans,” said a statement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service–Pacific Region.Biologists first identified and banded Wisdom in 1956 after she laid an egg. They determined her estimated age from that event 69 years ago, because the large...

Read More........→March 08, 2025

Scientists Discover Oldest Bird Fossils, Rewrite History of Avian Evolution

A photograph and interpretive line drawing show the Baminornis zhenghensis fossil – credit: Min WangAccording to a truly field-altering fossilized bird found in China, birds already existed in the Late Jurassic period, approximately 160 million years ago.The new discovery suggests that rather than a linear evolutionary path from dinosaur to bird, these two orders evolved somewhat simultaneously.An artistic representation of the newly discovered species, Baminornis zhenghensis, with the preserved bones highlighted – credit: Zhao Chuang.Baminornis zhenghensis is the world’s oldest species of avid. A holotype fossil was recently found in East China’s Fujian Province and described in the journal Nature. The pelvis, trunk, forelimbs, and part of the hindlimb are all intact.“Baminornis is a landmark discovery and ranks among the most important bird fossils unearthed since the discovery of Archaeopteryx in the early 1860s,” Stephen Brusatte, a paleontologist from the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the study but wrote a commentary accompanying it, tells Xinhua.“This is a groundbreaking discovery. It overturns the previous situation that Archaeopteryx was the only bird found in the Jurassic Period,” Zhonghe Zhou, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-author of the study, tells the Chinese news agency...

Read More........→March 05, 2025

Antarctica Yields Intact Skull — An Ancestor of Today’s Waterfowl That Survived Dinosaur Extinction

An artist’s impression of Vegavis iaai, an ancestor of modern waterfowl – credit: Mark Witton / SWNSA modern-looking diving bird was living somewhere in Antarctica when a massive asteroid struck the Earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct.But unlike the dinosaurs, this early ancestor of today’s waterfowl survived that mass extinction event, and a nearly complete skull has now been recovered by a special paleontological project on the southern continent.The animal is called Vegavis iaai—a Late Cretaceous diving bird which lived at the same time that Tyrannosaurus rex was dominating North America.The skull exhibits a long, pointed beak and a brain shape unique among all known birds previously discovered from the Mesozoic Era—the epoch stretching from 252 to 66 million years ago, and comprising the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous Periods.Researchers say the features place Vegavis in the group that includes all modern birds, representing the earliest evidence of a now widespread and successful evolutionary radiation across the planet.Assistant Professor of Biology Chris Torres from the University of the Pacific acquired the fragments of the animal’s skull from a geology sample obtained during a 2011 expedition by the Antarctic Peninsula Paleontology Project.Meticulously extracted and scanned into a 3D rendering, Torres said...

Read More........→February 21, 2025

Second-Ever Elusive Night Parrot Egg Discovered in Australia Where it Had Been ‘Extinct’ for 100 Years

Ngururrpa Ranger Lucinda Gibson gently holding the unfertilised night parrot egg – credit: supplied by Ngururrpa Rangers.Though it was unfertilized and therefore never destined to become an animal, the discovery of a night parrot egg in Western Australia has jolted the nation’s indigenous conservation community into excitement and action.Discovered last September in a vast and remote area called the Kimberly in Western Australia state, it’s hoped the egg can reveal some information about the bird’s breeding habits—of which virtually nothing is known.Adult night parrots are ground-dwelling birds that fly – Photo by Steve MurphyThe night parrot is one of the great natural enigmas left in the world: a parrot that flies but lives in burrows; that’s nocturnal, and virtually unobserved by modern science.Indigenous communities like the Kiwirrkurra and Ngururrpa, on whose lands night parrots have been confirmed to survive, have a sight-unseen relationship with the night parrot, identifying it by its calls across the deserts and drylands of Western Australia and Queensland.In 2013 a wildlife photographer captured video footage of a live bird in Queensland, confirming its existence for the first time in almost a century. Since then, they’ve been identified by their calls in two Indigenous Protected Areas (IPA) managed by the two communities...

Read More........→February 18, 2025

To save Australia’s animals, scientists must count how many are left. But what if they’re getting it wrong?

Shutterstock/ Glenda Rees David Lindenmayer, Australian National University; Benjamin Scheele, Australian National University; Elle Bowd, Australian National University, and Maldwyn John Evans, Australian National UniversityHumans are causing enormous damage to the Earth, and about one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction. Keeping track of what’s left is vital to conserving biodiversity. Biodiversity monitoring helps document changes in animal and plant populations. It tells us whether interventions, such as controlling feral predators, are working. It also helps experts decide if a species is at risk of extinction. However, long-term biodiversity monitoring can be expensive and time consuming – and it is chronically underfunded. This means monitoring is either not done at all, or only done in a small part of the range of a species. Our new research shows these limitations can produce an inaccurate picture of how a species is faring. This is a problem for conservation efforts, and Australia’s new “nature repair market”. It’s also a problem for Australia’s unique and vulnerable biodiversity. How monitoring works Biodiversity monitoring involves looking for a plant or animal species, or traces of it, and recording what was found, as well as when and where. Depending on the species, scientists...

Read More........→February 05, 2025

Endangered Thick-Billed Parrot That Once Roamed the US Is on the Way to Recovery

Thick-billed parrots – Credit: OVIS / Ernesto Enkerlin HoeflichA public-private partnership in Mexico just announced that the current population of thick-billed parrots is approximately 2,500 individuals—at least 10% higher than that recorded 12 years ago.The number was determined in a recent population survey in a protected area in the state of Chihuahua, where once upon a time this charismatic species roamed north into the United States.The thick-billed parrot is an emblematic species of the temperate forests of the Sierra Madre Occidental and once occurred in both Arizona and New Mexico.Since 1995, this species, listed in danger of extinction by the Mexican government, has been the subject of numerous studies and actions for protection and management, while the mountain forests on which it depends have been the focus of extensive reforestation.These efforts, led by the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas (CONANP) and the civil organization Organización Vida Silvestre (OVIS), along with the participation of local communities and other organizations in the US and Mexico, are yielding encouraging results as demonstrated by the increase in population, a statement from OVIS details.“This emerging success story reflects the importance of collaboration between society and government and a vision of healthy ecosystems and...

Read More........→January 05, 2025

Scientists Finally Discover Why Some Cats Are Orange–and Why They Tend to Be Males

Photo by Melanie Andersen on UnsplashOrange cats have won a reputation for being energetic rascals. In Italy, it’s said the red cat is always the leader.That’s probably because red/orange cats are almost always males, and now we know why thanks to two teams of scientists probing the genetic lineage of the orange coat in domesticated felines.Working separately,, reports Smithsonian Magazine, the two teams have independently arrived at the same conclusion—a mutation on the X chromosome.Male animals have one copy of the X chromosome, while females have two—explaining yet further why female cats with orange in their coats tend to have it mixed in with other colors such as black in the case of a ‘tortoiseshell cat,’ and white in the case of a calico.Kelly McGowan, a Stanford University geneticist who participated in one of the two studies, said that cats are a “fascinating exception” to the trend of orange coloration in other animals such as dogs, sheep, horses, and rabbits.“Our work provides an explanation for why orange cats are a genetic unicorn of sorts,” she told Newsweek.In most other mammals, mutations in a protein called Mc1r lead to red hair color, but not in cats. Instead, this decades-long mystery has been solved with the identification of the gene Arhgap36 that codes for a protein along the X chromosome.Arhgap36 has never...

Read More........→January 03, 2025

Cameroon islands offer safe home for orphaned chimps

MARIENBERG - Adolescent chimps are, in some respects, rather similar to their human counterparts.They live with mum until well into their teens, are sometimes a bit cheeky and, being highly social animals, struggle to survive alone until they have been taught how to fend for themselves.So when poachers kill mother chimps for food, keep the young chained in captivity for the exotic pet trade, or the family group is destroyed when its forest home is cleared for commercial palm oil plantations, the orphaned chimps need help.In Cameroon, the NGO Papaye International runs a sanctuary for the endangered animals on three islands in the Douala-Edea national park."The chimpanzees in the sanctuary are chimpanzees that have had a tragic past due to poaching, deforestation and groups that have been killed," said Marylin Pons Riffet, the 57-year-old French head of the charity.AFP | Daniel Beloumou Olomo"We only take in orphaned chimpanzees, who are young and therefore need the helping hand of man after having had a gun pointed at them or their habitat destroyed," she told AFP.The charity helps the orphans become re-accustomed to surviving in semi-wild conditions, but on islands away from their only predator -- the humans with whom they share 98 percent of their DNA and a good degree of behaviour.Populations of common chimpanzees, which used...

Read More........→December 31, 2024

Giant Millipede Lost to Science for a Century Rediscovered in Madagascar with 20 More Species in World-First Expedition

Spirostreptus sculptus (Photo by Dmitry Telnov/NHM London, UK)It may be the very definition of a creepy crawly, but this species of giant millipede was a major discovery for a recent scientific expedition to Madagascar.Not seen in 126 years, it was part of a bevy of species identified by scientists among the trees and waterfalls in a remote section of the largest forest on the island, called Makira.The expedition was part of Re:wild’s Search for Lost Species program, on the progress of which GNN has reported substantially over the last four years. It included teams of scientists and conservationists from 4 different organizations, as well as local guides.Different specialized team members were searching for mammals, fish, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and invertebrates that have not had a documented sighting in at least a decade or more, but are not assessed as extinct by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The full team, which numbered more than 30 people, searched Makira for several weeks in September 2023 and spent several months analyzing their results.“In the past the Search for Lost Species has primarily looked for one or two species on each expedition, but there are now 4,300 species that we know of around the world that have not been documented in a decade or more,” said Christina Biggs, lost species officer for Re:wild,...

Read More........→December 30, 2024