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.

Depending on the species, males have different strategies to try and insure that they reproduce, rather than just being a step-parent.

They may try to ensure paternity by increased surveillance and fighting off the competition, they may have more frequent sex with their long-term partners, they may physically punish unfaithful females or refuse to parent potentially unrelated offspring.

The greater wax moth (Galleria mellonella of the family Pyralidae) is capable of sensing sound frequencies of up to 300 kHz, making it possessor of the highest recorded frequency sensitivity of any animal in the natural world.

Humans are only capable of hearing sounds from 20 Hz up to around 20 kHz maximum and that drops as we age, while our pets can hear at higher frequencies (leading to concern about things like the hum from ballasts in CFL bulbs) but even dolphins, famous for their ultrasound, only cap out at around 160 kHz.

If you are toughing out harsh winter weather, snow can be a relief. It's a respite from biting winds and subzero temperatures.

But winter and spring snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has declined in recent years, putting plants and animals that depend on the space beneath the snow to survive the blustery chill of winter at risk.

Is a David and Goliath battle brewing in commercial squid fishery, with larger purse seiners robbing "scoop" fishermen of their livelihoods, sometimes illegally?

That is what Virginia Hennessey wrote in the Monterey Herald. Hearing claims of three squid brail (smaller boat) fishermen, one might think that the larger seine vessel squid fishermen are illegally catching all of the allowable quota.

But that’s just not the case. In fact, not only is there an abundance of squid in California’s waters – more than enough to go around – most of the brail-boat fishing fleet have no problem with the current management structure.

Mymaridae, commonly known as fairyflies, are one of about 18 families of chalcid wasps. Fairyflies are everywhere except Antarctica and include the world's smallest known insect - Kikiki huna, the body length of which is only 0.13 millimeters.

Fairyflies are among the most common chalcid wasps but seldom noticed by humans because of their minute size. Their apparent invisibility and delicate wings with long fringes invoke imagery of mythical fairies and earned them their common name.

Male and female birds often show differences in body size, with males typically being larger. Some birds, like many ratites – large, flightless species such as emus and cassowaries – are the opposite, with the females towering over the males. 

But some extinct ratites, among the largest female birds in the world, were almost twice as big as their male mates. A new paper says that the size difference in giant moa was not due to any specific environmental factors but instead evolved as a result of scaling-up of smaller differences in male and female body size shown by their smaller-bodied ancestors.

Many factors can push a wild animal population to the brink of collapse and ecologists have long sought ways to measure the risk of such a collapse.

Last year, MIT physicists demonstrated that they could numerically predict a population's risk of collapse by monitoring how fast it recovers from small disturbances, such as a food shortage or overcrowding. However, this strategy would likely require many years of data collection.

The same research team writing in Nature now describes a new way to predict the risk of collapse, based on variations in population density in neighboring regions. Such information is easier to obtain than data on population fluctuations over time, making it potentially more useful, according to the researchers.

Researchers visiting South Sudan identified a new genus of bat after discovering a rare specimen and determining the bat was the same as one originally captured in nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1939 and named Glauconycteris superba but that it did not fit with other bats in the genus Glauconycteris.

They placed this bat into a new genus - Niumbaha. The word means "rare" or "unusual" in Zande, the language of the Azande people in Western Equatoria State, where the bat was captured. The bat is just the fifth specimen of its kind ever collected, and the first in South Sudan, which declared independence in 2011.