For several scorching days in June 2021, an oppressive heat dome sat over western North America. In the Fraser Valley, inland from Vancouver, British Columbia, the temperature soared to 42.9 °C. The previous June high for the area—set in 1982—was 34.7 °C. Unable to escape the extraordinary heat, billions of marine creatures died—most noticeably barnacles, mussels, oysters, and clams. On land, Sofi Hindmarch, a wildlife biologist with the Fraser Valley Conservancy, tallied the heat dome’s horrifying impact on young owls. At nine locations across the Fraser Valley, Hindmarch, biologist Dick Cleg ..read more

The last rat on Tromelin Island—a small teardrop of scrubby sand in the western Indian Ocean near Madagascar—was killed in 2005. Rats had lived on the island, an overseas territory of France, for hundreds of rat generations. The rodents likely arrived in the late 1700s, when a French ship—carrying Malagasy people kidnapped for the slave trade—wrecked there, says Matthieu Le Corre, an ecologist at the University of Reunion Island, a French overseas region off the coast of Madagascar. Tromelin Island was probably home to at least eight different seabird species before the rodents arrived, includ ..read more

Hammerhead sharks—fish with pronounced oblong heads and bodies as long as small cars—are unmistakable. Seeing one of these critically endangered animals is a thrill, but seeing nearly a dozen plying the water side by side is worth writing home about. This was especially true for Mauvis Gore and her colleagues when, in 2022, they saw a group of scalloped hammerheads off the Cayman Islands—the first time since the 1970s that hammerheads have been seen schooling in the Caribbean Sea. “It was just luck, I think,” says Gore, an ecologist at Scotland’s Heriot-Watt University. Gore and her colleagues ..read more

In the fall of 1385, according to a 17th-century Icelandic text, a man named Ólafur went fishing off the northwestern coast of Iceland. In the cold seas cradled by the region’s labyrinthine fjords, Ólafur reportedly came across an animal that would have dwarfed his open wooden boat—a blue whale, the largest animal on record, known in the Icelandic language as steypireyður. Jón Guðmundsson, or Jón the Learned, the poet and scholar who recorded Ólafur’s story, called blue whales the “best and holiest of all whales.” For sailors who were in danger from other, more “evil” whales, Guðmundsson wrote ..read more

House cats may have a reputation for enthusiastically chowing down on fish, but in the wild, few felines consume prey from the ocean. In South Africa, though, scientists have recently discovered a small group of caracals—lithe russet-colored wildcats with short tails and long tufted ears—regularly eating seafood. Only, instead of fish, these cats are hunting seabirds. This unique diet qualifies these coastal caracals as a new ecotype, says Gabriella Leighton, a conservation biologist at South Africa’s University of Cape Town. The wildcats live across parts of Asia—including the Arabian Peninsu ..read more

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