Conservation Science

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Biologists have long thought that when large mammals, such as elephants and gazelles, are driven to extinction, small critters will inherit the earth. As those critters (think rodents) multiply, so will the number of disease-carrying fleas. Scientists have now experimentally confirmed this scenario, which is troubling because it could lead to a rise in human infection by diseases that can be transferred between animals and people.

On a recent Friday evening, I hovered among a small group of guests in a tiny storefront gallery in Bushwick. Each of us was there in anticipation of a rare chance to smell a phantom flower. When the pendant on a necklace I’d been given at the door began to glow, an attendant dressed in white led me behind a folding screen to a corner where the artist Miriam Simun waited. In silence, she fitted me with a plastic device that hooked over my ears and rested on my nose like a pair of glasses.

They're the blue blobs ­unnerving swimmers on [Australia's] Gold Coast beaches. The catostylus mosaics jellyfish, which have been spotted washed up on local beaches and floating in ­waterways over the past two weeks, aren’t new to the Coast and there’s little risk of harm. ... American biodiversity scientist Dr Healy Hamilton had to battle through the jellies to do research in the Broadwater for the past week. “It was like we had to swim through clouds of ­jellyfish to find seahorses and pipefish,” she said.

Scientists did not always know how dolphins came to be stranded, but a new study shows that clues about survival rates after release may be found in the marine mammal's blood. Published in Marine Mammal Science, the study looked at the blood work of common dolphins and compared it to their survival rates after release - a relatively easy and simple method of determining which dolphins are tough enough to survive on their own.

The nonprofit Downeast Institute for Applied Marine Research and Education has received a $2 million grant that will be used to expand the institute’s facility on Great Wass Island.

Paying attention to the twinned threats of climate change and species extinction requires ingenuity, cash, and nimble legal mechanisms. Two novel solutions—REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and Biodiversity Offsetting—comprise potentially win-win solutions.