The Florida Keys coral reefs stopped growing or significantly slowed their growth at least 3000 years ago and have been balanced between persistence and erosion ever since, according to a new study by the U.S. Geological Survey.

It’s 5am as we head out onto the outermost pier,  where our trusty vessel awaits. Fog clings to the surface of the water as harbour seals play in the marina’s kelp beds below.

Asian elephants demonstrate numeric ability which is closer to that observed in humans rather than in other animals. This is according to lead author Naoko Irie of SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies) in Japan. In a study published in the Springer-branded Journal of Ethology, Irie and her colleagues found that an Asian elephants' sense of numbers is not affected by distance, magnitude or ratios of presented numerosities, and therefore provides initial experimental evidence that non-human animals have cognitive characteristics similar to human counting. 

As winter in New England seems to get warmer, fall lingers longer and spring comes into bloom earlier, areas like northern New Hampshire and western Maine are seeing an unusual continued increase in winter ticks which are endangering the moose population. Researchers at the University of New Hampshire have found that the swell of infestations of this parasite, which attaches itself to moose during the fall and feeds throughout the winter, is the primary cause of an unprecedented 70 percent death rate of calves over a three-year period.

A line of zebrafish specially generated at the University of Oregon had a key role in discovering the cause of Saul-Wilson syndrome, a rare disease seen in just 15 cases worldwide.

In a quest to develop conservation strategies to protect a threatened species whose population has declined 80 per cent in the last 50 years, scientists at the University of Alberta have discovered the enigmatic nighthawk travels 20,000 kilometres each year in its annual migration from north of Fort McMurray to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil.

Why share food with non-family members when there is no immediate gain? An international team of researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology (MPI-EVA) in Leipzig, Germany, conducted observations of natural food sharing behavior of the chimpanzees of the Taï National Park, Ivory Coast. They found that chimpanzees who possess large, desirable food items, like meat, honey or large fruit share food with their friends, and that neither high dominance status nor harassment by beggars influenced possessors’ decisions to share.

Just like humans, young songbirds are thought to learn their vocalizations by listening to adults — a process that has been studied in the laboratory but never experimentally in the wild, until now.

Polar bears likely survived past warm periods in the Arctic, when sea ice cover was low, by scavenging on the carcasses of stranded large whales. This food source sustained the bears when they were largely restricted to land, unable to roam the ice in search of seals to hunt.

It was almost an ordinary day in the field for Dr. Nancy Foster Scholar Sarah Kienle — except for the Jeff Corwin show camera crew.