The Earth has entered a new period of extinction, a study by three US universities has concluded, and humans could be among the first casualties. The report, led by the universities of Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley, said vertebrates were disappearing at a rate 114 times faster than normal. The findings echo those in a report […]
Tag: biodiversity
New report connects human health to biodiversity protection
During February, the 14th World Congress on Public Health in Kolkata, India, revealed a new “ground-breaking” report entitled, Connecting Global Priorities: Biodiversity and Human Health, which demonstrates human health benefits yielded from protecting Earth’s biodiversity. It’s designed to be the new “flagship publication,” acting as a primary source of information that supports the upcoming 2015 […]
A study of island birds reveals that biodiversity is everywhere
Charles Darwin was famously inspired by the differing beak shapes and lengths of Galápagos finches – so inspired he eventually thought up the idea of evolution by natural selection. Now, researchers working on Santa Cruz Island, a small rocky island jutting out from the Pacific Ocean a few miles from the California coast, have once […]
Minimising the poisoning of migratory soaring birds: new guidance released
Soaring birds act as natural pest control for crops by feeding on agricultural pests such as rodents and insects. Yet throughout the Rift Valley / Red Sea region these birds are being poisoned by unsustainable agricultural practices. To counter this, the Migratory Soaring Birds project has released its “Guidance to minimize poisoning of migratory soaring […]
13 newly-discovered birds declared extinct
In a recent update of the IUCN Red List, scientists have identified 13 new bird species that have gone extinct since 1500. In total the list now finds that at least 140 bird species gone extinct in the past five hundred years, representing 1.3 percent of the world’s total known birds. The new extinct birds […]
One quarter of sharks and rays threatened with extinction
One quarter of all shark and ray species are threatened with extinction, according to a new study published in the open-access journal eLife. The paper analyzed the threat and conservation status of 1,041 species of chondrichthyans—the class of fish whose skeletons are made of cartilage instead of bone which includes sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras—and […]
New Bush Frog species discovered from Western Ghats of India
Researchers have described a new species of shrub frog Raorchestes ghatei from the Western Ghats of Maharashtra, in India. According to them, the species differs from its close relatives based on a combination of characters including small to medium-sized adult males, snout slightly projecting beyondmouth ventrally, tongue without papilla but with a lingual pit, nuptial […]
New butterfly species described from Dibang Valley in India
Dibang Valley in the North Eastern State of Arunachal Pradesh in India is gifting many pleasant surprises to butterfly lovers recently. There were two very rare rediscoveries reported from this area in 2012 and now a researcher has described a new butterfly species from this valley of lush greenery. According to a study published in […]