Science

NANCHANG, Dec. 14 (Xinhua) -- China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Lake, has shrunk by 90 percent from its high-water season level and entered an extremely low-water level, local authorities said Sunday.

At the landmark Xingzi hydrological station in east China's Jiangxi Province, the water level fell below the extremely low-water mark on Sunday morning, with the gauge reading only 8 meters.

This year, Poyang Lake's water level first dipped below the 12-meter drought warning line on Aug. 8, 87 days earlier than the average time of previous years. To date, the lake has been 217 days below the drought warning line, meaning nearly two-thirds of the year in low-water conditions.

To address the situation, a nearby water supply company in Duchang County has mobilized 10 pumps operating at full capacity to draw water from the outer lake to the plant's intake, said Wang Chunhua, head of the company's production and operations department.

The company also stepped up inspections of drinking water sources and increased the frequency of water quality testing to ensure the safety of drinking water for 160,000 urban and rural residents nearby.

The lake has repeatedly set new low-water records in recent years, with a growing trend of dry seasons starting earlier, lasting longer, and reaching lower water levels.

In 2022, its water level dropped to a record low of 4.6 meters. The following year, the lake entered its dry season on July 20, the earliest date on record.

Experts warn that the prolonged low water levels will affect the wintering of hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, including Siberian cranes, oriental storks and white-naped cranes, as well as the reproduction of aquatic species such as the finless porpoise.

Scientists working in Mexico have recorded multiple incidents in which a group of orcas hunt young great white sharks and eat their energy-rich livers.

While orca pods in South Africa, Australia and California have been recorded engaging in similar behavior, this is the first time that it has been documented in Mexico, according to a study published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science on Monday.

In one incident, recorded in August 2020 using various cameras as well as a drone that captured aerial footage, a group of five female killer whales were recorded working together to attack a young white shark and remove its liver, before sharing it between them.

A few minutes later, the group attacks another young white shark, successfully removing the liver.

Another recording dates to August 2022, when a mixed group of orcas were recorded attacking a young white shark in the same location, then eating the liver.

The study noted that in two of the three recorded predation events the orcas immobilized the shark by flipping it onto its back and deftly avoided bites that could thwart the attack.

An Australian freshwater Murray cod has surprised scientists by swimming a marathon 530 miles along a major river system, believed to be a record for the species.

The fish, named Arnie after Australia's recently retired Olympic champion Ariarne Titmus, was first tagged in early 2022 in Mullaroo Creek, about a 13-hour drive west of Sydney, said Arthur Rylah Institute researcher Zeb Tonkin.

Four years old and weighing in at 3.7 pounds at the time, it "took off" when floods hit the area in the spring of that year, Tonkin said, traveling an initial 470 miles upstream in fewer than two months.

The scaly river dweller, an apex water predator, was able to cover longer distances because barriers had been removed along the Murray River to let flood waters pass through.

"It basically provided free passage for fish," said Tonkin.

Arnie then turned around at some point in the past 12 months, swimming another 60 miles downstream toward home.

Researchers only discovered the extent of the fish's travels when sharing data with colleagues a couple of weeks ago.

"We've been working on these species for decades ... and we haven't come across that sort of scale of movement beforehand," Tonkin said. "Probably the best we have seen a Murray cod do is around 160 kilometers (100 miles)."

Peatlands cover just a fraction of Earth's surface, but store huge amounts of carbon. In the Peruvian Amazon, one of these swamps has switched to carbon neutral.

A palm swamp peatland in the Peruvian Amazon that normally absorbs more carbon than it releases each year has switched to being carbon neutral, even with no major disturbance by local people.

On their face, the findings, reported June 30 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, may seem like a sign of trouble. However, experts say there's more to the story.

Peatlands play a crucial role in the carbon cycle by absorbing carbon dioxide. In Peru, they cover some 22,000 square miles (56,000 square kilometers) — less than 5% of the country's total area. Yet they store about 5 gigatons of carbon belowground — roughly equivalent to all of the carbon stored aboveground in vegetation in Peru.

It's a similar picture globally, where, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, peatlands cover about 3% of the world's land area but store at least 550 gigatons of carbon — more than twice the carbon stored in all the world's forests.

"Peatlands represent such a small land area on Earth, but they are massively important as stocks of carbon," Jeffrey Wood, a biometeorologist at the University of Missouri and lead author of the new study, told Live Science. "These systems have accumulated gigatons of carbon over tens of thousands of years."

So what has happened in Peru?

Key ecosystems

Wood and his colleagues have been studying the dominant kind of Amazonian peatland in Peru's Quistococha Forest Reserve. These swampy ecosystems, known locally as aguajales, are dominated by moriche palms (Mauritia flexuosa).

These key ecosystems develop in areas that flood seasonally, with the palms providing a fruit called aguaje for locals, as well as for macaws, monkeys, tapirs and agoutis. These areas are densely vegetated havens for many birds, reptiles and mammals.

Crucially, the plants that grow there absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. But because the area is waterlogged, their dead leaves and other fallen matter usually accumulate as peat in the low-oxygen environment, which traps carbon instead of fully decomposing and releasing it back into the atmosphere.

Wood and his colleagues found that the peatland switched from being a strong carbon sink in 2018 and 2019 to being about carbon neutral in 2022.

Yet there were no obvious signs of human effects on the ecosystem, Wood said. "The peatland hadn't been drained and the trees hadn't all been cut down or taken down by a storm," he said. "It also wasn't a major drought year or a major heat wave."

**Instead, the researchers found that two factors led to the change. The first is that prolonged cloudless periods and higher sun intensities limited the photosynthesis of the plants, thus restricting their growth and how much carbon dioxide they absorbed.

The second was that lower water levels left more of the top of the peat exposed. This meant more oxygen was available to bacteria in the decaying matter, which decomposed faster, releasing more carbon dioxide and methane gases than usual.**

The extraction of water from aquifers in Iran is causing an area the size of Maryland to sink, exposing an estimated 650,000 people to the risks of subsidence and freshwater depletion.

The depletion of Iran's underwater aquifers is driving the ground to sink rapidly throughout the country, new research shows.

More than 12,120 square miles (31,400 square kilometers) of the country — an area roughly the size of Maryland — is now moving downward faster than 0.39 inches (10 millimeters) per year. In a more extreme example, the ground level has dropped by over a foot (34 cm) per year near the city of Rafsanjan, in central Iran.

This sinking, known as subsidence, exposes an estimated 650,000 people to a higher risk of other threats caused by changes in ground level, such as water scarcity and food insecurity, experts say. And part of the cause is ongoing drought in the country.

In Iran, about 60% of the water supply comes from underground aquifers. To study what effects this is having on the surface, Jessica Payne, a doctoral candidate in the School of Earth and Environment at the University of Leeds in the U.K., and her colleagues used radar data from the European Space Agency's Sentinel-1 satellite constellation to map how the ground level in Iran has changed over eight years between 2014 and 2022.

The researchers found 106 regions of subsidence covering a total of 12,120 square miles, or about 2% of the country.

"The rates of subsidence in Iran are some of the fastest in the world," Payne told Live Science. "We found about 100 sites across Iran where subsidence is faster than about 10 millimeters [0.4 inches) a year. In Europe, case studies are considered extreme if they exceed 5 to 8 millimeters [0.2 to 0.3 inches] a year."

The ground is sinking due to groundwater extraction, she said, with 77% of incidences of subsidence faster than 10 mm per year correlating with the presence of agriculture.

Two tropical cyclones are barreling through the Atlantic on a potential collision course — and in the unlikely event that they clash, a freak weather event merging them into one monster storm could wreak havoc along the East Coast.

Tropical Storm Humberto formed in the North Atlantic Ocean Wednesday and is expected to become a major hurricane this weekend, while another system looming in the Caribbean may strengthen into Tropical Storm Imelda in the coming days, according to Fox Weather meteorologist Greg Diamond.

But if these two storms get too close, they could trigger the rare phenomenon known as the Fujiwhara Effect.

What is the Fujiwhara Effect? The wild weather anomaly — named after Japanese meteorologist Sakuhei Fujiwhara in 1921 — sparks when two cyclones come within 900 miles of each other and begin spinning around a shared center in what meteorologists liken to an erratic dance.

Around 100 million years ago, male dinosaurs entered a "mating arena" in Colorado and danced their hearts out to attract females, a new study suggests.

Researchers uncovered a series of mating display scrapes preserved on the surface of rocks at Dinosaur Ridge in Jefferson County, Colorado. The state is known for dinosaur track sites, with previous studies suggesting that dinosaurs returned to these mating spots over successive breeding seasons.

The latest marks identified at Dinosaur Ridge suggest that multiple individuals participated in mating display behavior there during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) and allow the ridge to be classed as a "display arena," or lek, according to the new study, published online on June 4 in the journal Cretaceous Research.

The scapes were left by theropods, a group of bipedal dinosaurs that included Tyrannosaurus rex. Study lead author Caldwell Buntin, a lecturer in Earth science at Old Dominion University in Virginia, told Live Science that they don't have any direct evidence of what species left the marks, but it was a small therapod, around the size of a modern-day ostrich.

Researchers believe that the dinosaurs showed off to potential mates by jabbing their claws deep into the sand, dragging their feet and kicking up sand behind them. Buntin noted that the animals would alternate between their two feet when kicking up sand and had different moves.

"We can tell they had two moves so far, one walking backwards and one moving side to side," Buntin said in an email. "If they were really excited they would step a few feet backwards and repeat the motion, which usually erases the back half of each earlier set of scrapes. When this happened 3 or more times a few of these show a counter-clockwise turn, kind of like the moonwalk with a little spin."

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

Epidemiologists and climate scientists attributed 16,500 out of 24,400 heat deaths from June to August to the extra hot weather brought on by greenhouse gases.

The rapid analysis, which relies on established methods but has not yet been submitted for peer review, found climate breakdown made the cities 2.2C hotter on average, greatly increasing the death toll from dangerously warm weather.

“The causal chain from fossil fuel burning to rising heat and increased mortality is undeniable,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report. “If we had not continued to burn fossil fuels over the last decades, most of the estimated 24,400 people in Europe wouldn’t have died this summer.”

In June, dozens of biodegradable pods fell from the sky over the forests of Hawaii. Each one, delivered by drone, contained about 1,000 mosquitoes.

These weren’t just any mosquitoes — they were non-biting, lab-reared male mosquitoes carrying a common bacterium that results in eggs that don’t hatch when the males mate with wild females. The hope is that they will help to control the archipelago’s invasive mosquito population, which is decimating native bird populations, such as rare Hawaiian honeycreepers.

The birds, which are key pollinators and seed dispersers and also play a central role in Hawaiian culture, are in dire straits. There were once more than 50 known species of honeycreepers in Hawaii, but today there are only 17 left, most of which are endangered.

Last year, the ‘akikiki, a small gray bird, went functionally extinct in the wild, and less than 100 of the yellow-green ʻakekeʻe are estimated to remain.

Development and deforestation have had an impact, but according to Dr. Chris Farmer, Hawaii program director for the American Bird Conservancy (ABC), the “existential threat” is avian malaria, which is spread by mosquitoes.

Published in PLOS One on Wednesday, researchers at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin documented complex social behaviours in a wild group of Vampyrum spectrum for the first time.

Following a family of four, they found the bats greet each other when returning to the nest, share prey, co-parent their young and sleep in tight huddles, among other behaviours.

Lead author Marisa Tietge says she came across a roost by chance in a hollow tree, while studying a different bat species in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. She installed a motion-activated camera in the base of the tree to capture two parents and two pups over three months.

One noteworthy behaviour was a "hug-like" greeting, Tietge says, where bats in the nest would leave their spot to welcome a family member back.

"There's kind of a short wrapping of its wings around the other, like a short hug, then letting go, and then both or all of them go back to the main roosting spot," she said.

Tietge theorizes the hug helps them identify each other based on smell and builds necessary social bonds for survival.

To verify their discoveries weren’t just artifacts of their methodology, the researchers applied their model to data from other species—bats, dolphins, gorillas, and chimpanzees. The results varied considerably, with some species showing little evidence of ancient structure while others showed completely different patterns. This variation across species strengthens the credibility of the specific pattern found in humans.

The researchers also examined which genes had unusually high or low amounts of ancestry from the minority population. Genes rich in minority ancestry often had functions related to neural development, including neuron cell connections, startle response, and neurotransmitter transport.

Conversely, genes with little minority ancestry were often involved in RNA processing, cell structure organization, and immune functions. These patterns hint that the two ancestral populations may have adapted to different environments before reuniting, with certain genetic variants from each population offering advantages for specific biological functions.

This discovery joins other recent findings showing human evolution is more complex than we once thought. Rather than populations simply splitting from one another in a tree-like pattern, human evolution increasingly appears to involve repeated separation and remixing of populations.

The admixture event identified in this study is much older than previously detected interbreeding events, such as those between modern humans and Neanderthals or between modern humans and a proposed “ghost population” in West Africa. Unlike these more recent events that affected only certain human populations, the ancient admixture event described here is shared by all humans.

“The fact that we can reconstruct events from hundreds of thousands or millions of years ago just by looking at DNA today is astonishing,” says Scally. “And it tells us that our history is far richer and more complex than we imagined.”

Yeah this is kind of clickbait stuff from back in the day but I really remembered the rant and enjoyed it, so I looked it up and it was preserved here.

In spite of having plagued humans for millennia, typhoid fever is rarely considered in developed countries today. But this ancient threat is still very much a danger in our modern world.

According to research published in 2022, the bacterium that causes typhoid fever is evolving extensive drug resistance, and is rapidly replacing strains that aren't resistant.

Currently, antibiotics are the only way to effectively treat typhoid, which is caused by the bacterium Salmonella enterica serovar Typhi (S Typhi). Yet over the past three decades, the bacterium's resistance to oral antibiotics has been growing and spreading.

In their study, researchers sequenced the genomes of 3,489 S Typhi strains contracted from 2014 to 2019 in Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and India, and found a rise in extensively drug-resistant (XDR) Typhi.

XDR Typhi is not only impervious to frontline antibiotics, like ampicillin, chloramphenicol, and trimethoprim/sulfamethoxazole, but it is also growing resistant to newer antibiotics, like fluoroquinolones and third-generation cephalosporins.

The grey seals slide out of their cages into the Baltic Sea near the Lithuanian coast, swimming off to new lives imperilled by climate change, pollution and shrinking fish stocks.

The seals have been nurtured at a rehabilitation centre in the Lithuanian port of Klaipeda.

Survival rates for cubs in the wild can be as low as five percent, according to local scientists.

The Baltic Sea, which is shared by the European Union and Russia, rarely freezes over now, depriving seals of sanctuaries to rear their cubs.

"Mothers are forced to breed on land in high concentration with other seals," said Vaida Surviliene, a scientist at Vilnius University.

"They are unable to recognise their cubs and often leave them because of it," she said.

Rearing cubs ashore also leaves them exposed to humans, other wild animals, rowdy males, as well as a higher risk of diseases, according to Arunas Grusas, a biologist at the centre.

Grusas began caring for seals in 1987 when he brought the first pup back to his office at the Klaipeda Sea Museum, which now oversees the new rehabilitation centre built in 2022.

"We taught them how to feed themselves, got them used to the water –- they had to get comfortable with the sea, which spat them out ashore practically dying," Grusas said.

The very first cubs were placed into makeshift baths set up in an office.

"It was a sensation for us, there were practically no seals left then," Grusas said.

The scientists had to learn how to nurse the cubs back to health.

First, the cubs were treated to liquid formula before moving onto solid food.

At the time in the late 1980s, the seals were close to extinction –- there were just around 4,000 to 5,000 left in the sea from a population of around 100,000 before the Second World War.

...

The 1960s also saw the use of pesticides in agriculture that were "incredibly toxic for predators", the scientist said.

The seals at the top of the food chain in the Baltic Sea absorbed the pollution, leaving the females infertile and the entire population with a weak immune system, unable to ward off parasites and resist infections.

After a ban on toxic pesticide use, the population survived, with the current estimates putting the number of grey seals in the Baltic Sea at 50,000 to 60,000.

In a response to overfishing, the European Commission also finally banned commercial cod fishing in the eastern Baltic Sea in 2019.

"Over 80 percent of fish resources in the Baltic Sea have been destroyed, the seals have nothing left to eat," said Grusas.

The ban has yet to show a positive result.

"There has been no fishing of eastern Baltic cod for around five years, but it's not yet recovering -- and it's one of the main sources of food" for the seals, said Darius Daunys, a scientist at Klaipeda University.

Recently a growing number of adult seals have been washing up on Lithuanian beaches.

Scientists like Grusas point the finger at near-shore fishing nets, where seals desperate for food end up entangled and ultimately drown.

Scientists confirm that two of the world’s most destructive invasive termite species are not only spreading in the United States but also hybridizing – the process of two different species crossbreeding to produce a hybrid.

This raises concerns about their potential to spread farther and cause even greater structural and environmental damage.

A new study from the University of Florida Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS) confirms that hybrid termite colonies have now been established in South Florida. Just published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the study documents how the invasive Formosan subterranean termites and Asian subterranean termites are not only coexisting in urban environments but also breed with each other.

“About 10 years ago, we first observed males and females from the two species interact through interspecies courtship behaviors during spring termite dispersal flights,” said Thomas Chouvenc, associate professor of urban entomology at the UF/IFAS Fort Lauderdale Research and Education Center and lead author of the study. “This was unexpected, and it raised red flags about the possibility of hybrid populations forming in the field.”

Both termite species form massive colonies that, once mature, can send out winged termites to find a mate and establish nests as new queen and king. Over the past decade, UF/IFAS scientists monitored termite activity across neighborhoods where the two species overlap. While initial lab studies showed that hybrid colonies could form, it was unclear whether they could thrive or produce fertile offspring.

“Unfortunately, termite colonies are very cryptic and trying to find hybrid colonies in the field is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” said Chouvenc. “We monitored termite activity closely for more than a decade to check for the establishment of hybrid colonies in some of the neighborhoods affected by the two termite species.”

“All initial observations raised doubt that hybrid colonies could thrive and produce fertile offspring, as quarantined lab colonies first appeared to be sterile mules,” Chouvenc added.

Then in 2021, Chouvenc and his team began collecting winged termites in Fort Lauderdale that didn’t match the shape or form of either species. That’s when they ramped up field monitoring.

“At first, I could not believe it, as I was hoping to never find it,” he said. “Since then, we have confirmed the presence of hybrid swarms every year since 2021, including in April 2025.”

Genetic testing confirmed these samples were hybrid termites, with individuals having half their genes from the two species. For the past four years, researchers collected winged hybrid termites during swarming events but were unable to determine the precise location of the colonies where the different winged hybrid termites came from. That changed in October 2024, during a routine survey of a city park in Fort Lauderdale, where the team discovered a tree infested with a colony that displayed hybrid-soldier traits they had previously studied in the lab.