Ecology

Sadly, such excursions are no longer possible in many of Chernobyl’s habitats, which are now strewn with landmines placed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. Vyshnevskiy tells me of a firefighter tackling a forest fire caused by a downed Russian drone who stepped on a mine. His remains were found 70 metres away. He knows of three wild horses killed the same way, but the size of the zone means most animal casualties will go unnoticed.

During my travels, minefields and military checkpoints became familiar. Areas that were once tourist attractions or public buildings are now highly classified sites. This militarisation has squeezed scientists out – at one point, there would have been hundreds here, but during my visit, we all fit around the same table while Vyshnevskiy cooks dinner.

Animal communities, including thousands of tubeworms and bivalves, have been observed at depths up to 9,533 meters in the Mariana Trench, marking the deepest and most extensive chemosynthesis-based ecosystems known. These organisms rely on chemical energy, such as methane produced by microbes, rather than sunlight, indicating that such deep-sea life may be more widespread than previously recognized.

The study

Marine experts say governments must protect fragile ecosystems from destructive practices such as bottom trawling and deep sea mining to combat the climate crisis.

The preserved area is more than 1,000 square miles, larger than New York City and Los Angeles combined. When Field Museum scientists visited the region in 2016 to conduct an inventory of wildlife, they estimated that the area is home to at least 3,000 species of plants, 550 fish species, 110 amphibians, 100 reptiles, and 160 mammals.

The study titled, "Expansion of the genomic and functional diversity of global ocean giant viruses," was published on April 21, 2025 in the journal Nature npj Viruses.

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4477254

Vent, who is Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq, was raised by her great-grandmother and her aunties in Huslia, a village of 300 in the vast, wild country south of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. No roads traversed the spruce forest and boggy tundra. Rivers scrawled in great loops from the base of the mountains, writing their history across the flats in oxbow lakes and sloughs that gleamed with light. Huslia lay along one of the largest waterways, the Koyukuk. For generations, it and the region’s other major rivers had served as highways connecting the Alaska Native communities scattered in this trackless landscape to one another and to the fish camps and hunting places and berry-picking grounds where residents like Vent harvested much of their food.

Over a decade ago, Vent joined an auntie at a public meeting in Huslia’s community hall, where villagers had gathered to discuss a state proposal for a new road. Maps detailed a route that, if built, would begin northeast of Huslia from the Dalton Highway, the only major road in northern Alaska, and run more than 200 miles west, nearly to the Inupiat village of Kobuk, one of several on the Kobuk River. The so-called Ambler Access Project—led mostly by the state’s economic development arm, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA—would allow foreign companies to develop copper mines near Kobuk. Trucks would travel the new road up to 168 times per day, carrying ore concentrate. Once they reached the Dalton Highway, they would transport the ore south to Fairbanks, where trains would carry it to a port in south-central Alaska—a total journey of about 800 miles.

The stakes were high. The road would slice across the Koyukuk, the Kobuk, and nine other major rivers as well as thousands of streams, threatening the peoples’ supply of salmon, sheefish, and whitefish with toxic spills and sediment runoff. It would also interrupt the migratory path of the Western Arctic caribou herd—until recently, Alaska’s largest—threatening another key source of sustenance for more than 40 communities.

Vent was impressed by the elders she heard speak at the meeting. “They knew that showing up was going to help prevent this happening to our land and our animals and our water and our people,” Vent, now 24, told me.

But Vent and other opponents came to believe that the road was about more than the mines at its terminus. It would open one of the largest expanses of unbroken land left on Earth to industrial development. The new artery could be the starting point for yet more roads and mines, and perhaps ultimately allow public access to places long protected by their remoteness. “It’s about the Western world wanting to come in and take from Indigenous people,” Vent said. “Once this road opens, there’s no going back.”

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Now, for the first time ever, an international study led by the Institute of Evolutionary Biology (IBE), a joint center of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC) (the Spanish National Research Council [CSIC]) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF), in conjunction with the Botanical Institute of Barcelona (IBB, CSIC-CMCNB), has discovered a species of blow fly (family Calliphoridae) whose larvae infiltrate colonies of harvester termites.