TNC commits $1.6 billion to ocean conservation

Oceans

Environmental group The Nature Conservancy (TNC) announced this week its $1.6 billion plan to help ensure the new protection of up to 1.5 million square miles of the world’s most biodiversity-critical ocean habitats, which is a 15% increase in protected areas of this...

Frog plague worse than scientists originally thought

Animals

In the early 1990s, researchers linked the mass die-offs of frogs around the world to a fungus they named Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short. The fungus ravages frogs’ skin and makes it peel off–which for amphibians, their skin is critical to...

Corals are also climate “refugees”

Oceans

In recent years warming ocean temperatures caused by climate change have been devastating coral reefs around the world. In places like Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (one of the Earth’s largest living structures), warming events in 2016 and 2017 killed...

Sea star wasting epidemic made worse by warming waters

Oceans

Sea stars are a common sight on the Pacific coast, you don’t even have to be a diver as you can usually find one in a tide pool. But UC Santa Cruz explained that beginning in 2013, a mysterious disease crippled sea star populations up and down the U.S. west...

Salty runoff creating “chemical cocktails” in drinking water

Water

Last Week we wrote about the detriment that road salt can have on waterways, plants, and animals and how runoff is causing dead zones in lakes. It turns out that the story doesn’t stop there and all that salt is actually reacting with soil and water pipes to...