The latest species to be added to the ever-expanding list of animals that use tools are colorful, tropical fish that know their way around an underwater anvil. Biologists have documented wrasse species smashing prickly urchins against rocks and hard corals to eat the soft insides—like picking up a coconut and bashing it against a rock to get to the meaty innards. Back in 1960, Jane Goodall crushed the perception that humans were the only tool users when she observed chimpanzees using sticks to eat ants. In the decades since, scientists have observed tool use in a range of animals, from dolphin ..read more

The northeast Pacific Ocean is home to an astonishing array of marine creatures—spiky urchins, multiarmed sea stars, soft sea slugs the color of lemons, and barnacles with their heads glued to rocks. Strolling the seashore or diving below the ocean’s surface, we can see the adult forms of these creatures, but what about their earlier stages? Before they settled down—literally—and moved to the seafloor, almost all started life as zooplankton, marine fauna adrift on the ocean’s currents. Although zooplankton and phytoplankton, the plantlike drifters that most zooplankton will feast on, are in th ..read more

Killer whales occasionally find themselves where they don’t belong. In the Arctic, they routinely get stuck on the wrong side of encroaching sea ice. Or they swim into an enclosed space at high tide, their escape cut off when the water recedes—as in the case of kʷiisaḥiʔis (Brave Little Hunter), a young female killer whale that recently became trapped in a lagoon in British Columbia. That’s also what happened last year when two male killer whales inadvertently became imprisoned in Barnes Lake, a tidal lagoon in southeast Alaska. Although killer whales can often get themselves out of trouble, o ..read more

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world visit British Columbia’s coastal rivers in search of an exciting up-close experience with a grizzly bear. That is, every year except 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns closed most of the province’s ecotourism industry. The sudden absence of tourists here and around the world gave scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study our influence on wild spaces. And according to two recent studies, while people certainly enjoy watching bears, grizzlies don’t necessarily like being watched. One of the studies, led by Monica Short, a graduate student i ..read more

Seaweed is versatile; it provides habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals. Within the US Department of Energy is the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), a scientific branch devoted to tackling challenging, high-risk projects on energy technologies. ARPA-E takes big swings and looks for big rewards. And so far, the agency has awarded US $5-million ..read more

For decades, the world’s commercial ships have depended on a fossil fuel so sticky and thick that it needs to be heated to around 150 °C just to get it to flow through a vessel’s innards. Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) is one of the dirtiest fuels out there. “It’s the last step of the [oil] refining process,” says Morten Bo Christiansen, head of the energy transition team at Danish shipping giant Maersk. “You could say, the bottom of the barrel.” Yet now, as the International Maritime Organization (IMO)—the United Nations branch tasked with managing global shipping—implements new regulations intended to ..read more

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them close attention, as they were hardly glamorous creatures, and in retrospect, I took them for granted. Nevertheless, I did appreciate their presence. On warm-season evenings, the football-sized rodents—they resemble enormous voles or small, long-tailed beavers—would chug back and forth, harvesting cattails and carrying fronds to their den to eat in privacy. The sight of a whiskered nose held just abov ..read more

Twenty years ago, Geoff Plant, the then attorney general of British Columbia, made an offer to the Haida Nation. Many West Coast First Nations, including the Haida, had never signed treaties with the Canadian government ceding their traditional lands or resources, and Plant was trying to revive the faltering process of treaty making. He wanted to smooth over relations with Indigenous peoples, but he also wanted to help the province extract more resources from Indigenous lands. To entice the Haida—a nation known throughout Canada for its political savviness and resolve—he had what he thought wa ..read more

In March 2024, about a dozen scientists and crew members ventured into the Gulf of Mexico armed with an underwater rover, crab traps, and other research kit. Led by Craig McClain, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, the team set out to study the site where, on April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and setting off one of the worst environmental disasters in US history. It was McClain’s third trip to the disaster’s ground zero, and despite the 14 years that have elapsed, he found that wildlife surrounding the exploded wellhead wa ..read more

Rebecca Cairns-Wicks looks up at the branches of a black cabbage tree. It’s growing at the edge of a grassy road along a sinuous ridge leading up the misty slopes of the cloud forest on Saint Helena Island. Umbels of small flowers, like bunched-up daisies, drape over the tree’s flat, leathery leaves, and a mat of ferns, lichens, mosses, and other organisms coat its trunk, giving it a strikingly black appearance. “This tree is iconic,” says Cairns-Wicks, a plant geneticist and head of the St Helena Research Institute. Saint Helena—part of the British overseas territory Saint Helena, Ascension ..read more