Fracking, which mines natural gas using horizontal, hydraulically fractured wells, is widespread across Pennsylvania, with high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (HVHHF) from the Marcellus and Utica shales covering up to 280,000 km² of the Appalachian Basin. 

A new paper in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences by Dr.Erik Kiviat, of the Hudsonia ecology group, says that natural gas wells are a threat to biodiversity, including pollution from toxic chemicals, the building of well pads and pipelines, and changes to wetlands.

Parasites comprise a large proportion of the diversity of species in every ecosystem but they are rarely included in analyses or models of food webs.  Would it make a difference?

A new paper says that
including parasites does alter the structure of food webs, but that most changes occur because of an increase in diversity and complexity, rather than from unique characteristics of parasites.

A new species of tiny blenniiform fish has been discovered in the southern Caribbean. Haptoclinus dropi is only around 2cm in length with a color pattern that includes iridescence on the fins.

The proposed common name of the species is four-fin blenny, due to the division of the dorsal fin into four sections, which is a distinguishing feature of the genus and unique among blenniiform fishes. 

Many seeds germinate in the soil and get their nutrition in the dark from limited reserves of starch and lipids, so as soon as possible they  grow toward light. Light-sensing proteins find the shortest route to sunlight – and then plants are even able to bend in the direction of the light source. 

Many species of native wildlife are abundant in anthropogenic areas, but this does not necessarily mean that their populations are healthy, or that the organisms will continue to thrive in human environments. Large numbers of raccoon dogs, for example, are known to inhabit forest patches within Tokyo, Japan, but a recent camera trap survey found that many adults are failing to breed. Together with the fact that hundreds of thousands of the animals become roadkill each year, the recent findings results suggest that Tokyo's raccoon dog population might diminish over time. 

Since the colonization of North American in the 17th century, few ecosystems have been so routinely and extensively disturbed as the salt marshes of Cape Cod. Among other things, residents have dug drainage ditches throughout the wetlands in order to make them less habitable to mosquitoes; developed the shoreline to facilitate the introduction of industrial, maritime, and residential facilities; and harvested huge numbers of edible wildlife off the coast. Over the past century or so, the human population has increased by approximately six-fold, placing extreme pressure on the wetland habitat.

For many of us, the term "nature preserve" tends to conjure up an image of a wild landscape that is either unmanaged or only lightly managed, and is undisturbed save for the quiet footfalls of the occasional hiker. While it's true that this picture does reflect conditions in a number of contemporary preserves, it wouldn't have been so accurate when these areas were first protected; further, this scenario may be just as "unnatural" as the highly disturbed, homogeneous landscapes that preserves are created to prevent.

How much does tourism help fund bird conservation? Given the continuing boom of the "avitourism" industry, this sounds like the sort of question to which both environmentalists and entrepreneurs should know the answer.

However, while researchers have performed calculations investigating the availability of tourism revenues for mammal and frog conservation efforts, nobody has explored similar trends in other taxa--or, to be more accurate, nobody had explored those trends until a group of Australian scientists recently decided to crunch the relevant numbers.

The results of their analyses were reported earlier this month in PLoS ONE.

You might interpret roadkill as a sign that highways are bad for wildlife, but it's possible these carcasses actually indicate that roadsides are attractive habitats that can support a large number of individuals. That's one interpretation, anyway, of a new study investigating small mammal populations living along highways in central Spain. 

You may not think of private gardens as wildlife refugia, but an increasing body of scientific evidence suggests that these habitats can host a variety of species and act as stepping stones across landscapes that are otherwise dominated by human structures. To increase the effectiveness of gardens as havens for wildlife, many researchers have touted a management technique variously known as "wildlife gardening," "ecological gardening," and "naturalistic gardening." Whatever you call it, this method involves avoiding pesticides and mowing, using organic compost instead of industrial fertilizers, and providing habitat structures, such as ponds or wood piles, that provide food, water, and places where animals can take shelter.