An international collaboration of conservation, environment, and human development experts and practitioners led by the United Nations Development Program’s Human Development Report Office (UNDP-HDRO) proposes a new way for countries to measure and improve their relationships with nature and each other.

25 June 2025/Kiel. Overfishing not only depletes fish stocks — it also alters the genetic blueprint of marine life. In the central Baltic Sea, cod (Gadus morhua) have not only become scarcer, but also significantly smaller than in the past. Researchers at the GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel have now shown for the first time that Eastern Baltic cod grow markedly more slowly than they once did, and that this change is reflected in their genome. Intensive fishing pressure triggers genetic responses in overexploited stocks, with long-term implications for their future development. The findings are published today in the journal Science Advances.

Parental egg-care in fish traps them in an evolutionary dead-end through the loss of the chorion-hardening system, find scientists from the Institute of Science Tokyo. Fish have diverse egg-caring strategies that have independently emerged multiple times across lineages. Comparative whole genome analysis of 240 fish species revealed a strong correlation between loss of the chorion-hardening system and parental egg-care, revealing the mechanisms behind the evolutionary bias that restricts egg-caring fish from becoming non-egg-carers.

A trade-off between tooth size and jaw mobility has restricted fish evolution, Nick Peoples at the University of California Davis, US, and colleagues report June 24^th in the open-access journal PLOS Biology.

Study provides critical framework for tracking the origin of Chondria tumulosa, a rapidly spreading macroalga in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument