How do wildlife researchers know when an endangered population is sick? They can detect infectious microbes in animal waste, but the presence of a microbe doesn’t always equate to impactful symptomatic infections. In a new study, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers used advanced molecular tools to survey the health status of endangered Indiana bats, identifying microbiome changes resulting from parasitic infections.

Shark sightings by scuba divers reveal the movements of marine predators throughout the year, according to a study published February 26, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One by George Balchin, William Hughes and colleagues at the University of Sussex, U.K., and Aquaplanet Dive Center, South Africa.

Eavesdropping on baleen whale songs in the Pacific Ocean reveals year-to-year variations that track changes in the availability of the species they forage on, reports a new study led by John Ryan, of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), U.S., published February 26, 2025 in the open-access journal PLOS One.

Fossil eggshells from Utah's Cedar Mountain Formation include Cretaceous period eggs from 3 feathered bird-like dinosaurs, 2 herbivorous dinosaurs, and a crocodile-like species found for the first time outside Europe

A University of Rhode Island-led team has gathered photographic data on daily mammalian activity, studying 445 total species around the world with surprising results. The project generated a massive dataset of animal images examining species’ diel phenotype plasticity, an important step to understand the impacts of environmental change and help direct conservation actions.

By tracking half a million fungal highways and the traffic flows within them, researchers describe how plants and symbiotic fungi build efficient supply chains. The team built an imaging robot that allowed them to gather 100 years’ worth of microscopy data in under 3 years. This work advances our understanding of how fungi move billions of tons of CO2e into underground ecosystems each year.