English

Britain's native hedgehog population has declined by half in the last two decades, with less than a million now remaining in the UK. The reclusive creatures are vanishing from rural areas at record rates, according to a new study by the British Hedgehog Preservation Society (BHPS) and People’s Trust for Endangered Species. The State of Britain’s Hedgehogs report warns there are fewer than one million of hedgehogs left living in our gardens, hedgerows and fields. This is down half a million on 1995's estimations.

The Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog (Ecnomiohyla rabborum) was unlike any other species on planet Earth. Inhabiting only the forests of Panama, the frog had enormously charismatic brown eyes, and feet so oversized they looked cartoonish. But what made the frog truly special was the way it looked after its tadpoles. The Rabbs’ was the only known frog in the world where tadpoles would eat the literal flesh of their fathers’ back to survive their early days of life. That’s right: Dads could feed their offspring with their own flesh.

Neonicotinoid insecticides have been signaled as an important driver of widespread declines in bee diversity and abundance. Neonicotinoids were registered in the 1990s and by 2010 accounted for one third of the global insecticide market. Following a moratorium in 2013, their use on open-field crops was completely banned in the EU in 2018. Pesticide regulation should be based on solid and updated scientific evidence, whereby products showing unacceptable effects on the environment are not approved.

A decline in bird populations is the first indication that something is ecologically amiss, according to an expert from a wildlife organization. "Birds are the first stimulus of degradation in an area. If there is a decrease in the bird populations somewhere, it indicates that something is wrong there," Ahmet Emre Kutukcu, a wildlife expert from World Wildlife Fund (WWF) Turkey, told Anadolu Agency (AA).

MEPs call on the Commission to beef up its Pollinators Initiative and to come up with new measures to protect bees and other pollinators. In a resolution adopted on Wednesday, Parliament welcomes the EU Pollinators Initiative, but highlights that, as it stands, it fails to protect bees and other pollinators from some of the many causes of their decline, including intensive farming, pesticides, climate change, land-use changes, loss of habitat and invasive species.

Since 2013, a European Union moratorium has restricted the application of three neonicotinoids to crops that attract bees because of the harmful effects they are deemed to have on these insects. Yet researchers have just demonstrated that residues of these insecticides can still be detected in rape nectar from 48% of the plots of studied fields, their concentrations varying greatly over the years.

Several reports suggested that rice seedling nursery-box application of some systemic insecticides (neonicotinoids and fipronil) is the cause of the decline in dragonfly species noted since the 1990s in Japan. We conducted paddy mesocosm experiments to investigate the effect of the systemic insecticides clothianidin, fipronil and chlorantraniliprole on rice paddy field biological communities.

In May of 1993, rice farmers living near Lake Shinji, in southwestern Japan, began widely using an insecticide called imidacloprid. Within the same year, populations of arthropods that form the base of the food web, such as crustaceans and zooplankton, began to plummet. By the end of 1994, two commercially important fish that depend on these creatures for food, eel and smelt, crashed as well. And as the use of imidacloprid and other neonicotinoids has grown over the years, the fish have never recovered.

One of the most iconic Halloween symbols has been suffering a severe population drop for more than a decade, officials from the the Connecticut Deprtment of Energy and Environemntal Protection said Monday.

What's normal Across Connecticut is that bats are on the move with three species of tree bats moving south for the winter and while the six cave bat species moving "shorter distances," where they will spend the winter hibernating, DEEP officials said.

The renowned author and whistleblower Evaggelos Vallianatos describes British environmentalist and campaigner Dr Rosemary Mason as a “defender of the natural world and public health.” I first came across her work a few years ago. It was in the form of an open letter she had sent to an official about the devastating environmental and human health impacts of glyphosate-based weed killers. What had impressed me was the document she had sent to accompany the letter.