Meet Patrick Urban: The German dung beetle specialist who found a species never known to science among collected beetles
PC: University of Nebraska–Lincoln From university laboratories in Germany to beetle specimens collected from dung in China, Patrick Urban’s career has focused on insects that are easy to overlook. The German biologist specialises in dung beetle taxonomy…
Texas volunteers started a cleanup 40 years ago with 2,800 people; the movement has now collected 1.3 million plastic bottles from coastlines and waterways worldwide and could change plastic policy
More than 1.3 million plastic bottles were collected from coastlines and waterways worldwide in a massive volunteer cleanup effort that began 40 years ago with just 2,800 people on the Texas Gulf Coast. The International Coastal Cleanup, organised by…
Australian high school students collected more than 2,000 plastic bottles to form a greenhouse, 11 years later, the structure supplies food for the school’s garden
A project that began as an ecological lesson has transformed the lives of students at an Australian high school. In the country’s capital of Canberra, students at the Richardson Primary School in south Canberra collected more than 2,000 plastic…
Scientists searched for threatened Australian rainforest frogs without seeing or hearing them; DNA in creek water collected up to 22 km downstream revealed populations in places where the frogs had disappeared
Photos of a study species: the Australian Lace-lid (L. dayi)Photo credit: Conrad J Hoskin. In the cool, wet upland streams of Queensland’s Wet Tropics, several species of rainforest frog were pushed to the brink in the 1980s and 1990s by chytrid fungus,…
In 2020, 10-year-old Murphy Widdowson collected a spider on a remote Australian island that experts could not identify; scientists later declared it a new species and named it Artoriopsis murphyi after him
While on the remote island Murphy picked up a small spider that intrigued him, and he decided not to wonder what sort of spider he’d found, but to seek the opinion of an expert. For most kids, finding a spider would be a scream, and then a quick…
New Orleans collected 9,000 discarded Christmas trees and airlifted them into coastal wetlands; the programme has restored marsh equal to nearly 200 football fields
A helicopter dropping its first bundle of trees for the Christmas tree drop restoration project (US fish and wild life service photos) Every year after Christmas, thousands of used trees are thrown away. In New Orleans, however, many of them get a second…