99 Percent Invisible: For the Love of Peat

Some scientists from Switzerland tried to calculate how much carbon could be removed if we planted trees all around the world. They published a paper in the journal Nature arguing that if humans planted a trillion trees, it could remove one-third of all of the CO2 we had put up there in the first place. It was a dramatic finding that led to a lot of dramatic headlines. The way that the paper was being described in some articles, you would think that trees were some kind of climate change panacea, that they were the key to fixing global warming. [...]

Richard Lindsay is a scientist at the University of East London’s Sustainability Institute. “Everybody’s saying, let’s plant a million trees, let’s plant a billion trees,” he says, “Yes, I’m all in favor of that. But let’s plant the right tree in the right place.” Lindsay has personal experience watching a lot of trees get planted in the wrong place. Back in the 1980s, he saw firsthand the impact of a controversial tree planting scheme in Scotland that ended up threatening one of the most special ecosystems in the world.

In the 1980s, the British government started using tax breaks to private citizens to encourage tree planting efforts around the country. The goal was to boost the UK’s timber supply. And it was a really good tax break, especially for the super-rich. But questions started to emerge about where exactly these trees were going to go. In order for this to work, investors needed large tracts of undeveloped, unwanted land. And there was one place that met the criteria—it was called the Flow Country. The Flow Country is a vast open area in the far north of Scotland that looks almost like the arctic tundra. The best way to appreciate the flow country might be in an airplane. From the sky, it looks like a Persian rug—streaked with colorful sphagnum mosses and dotted with little pools of water.

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Aeon: Sex is real

There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When we look across the diversity of life, sex takes stranger forms than anyone has dreamt of for humans. The biological definition of sex takes all this in its stride. It does so despite the fact that there are no more than two biological sexes in any species you’re likely to have heard of. To many people, that might seem to have ‘conservative’ implications, or to fly in the face of the diversity we see in actual human beings. I will make clear why it does not. [...]

Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. As well as simultaneous hermaphrodites, which are both male and female, sequential hermaphrodites are first one sex and then the other. There are also individual organisms that are neither male nor female. The biological definition of sex is not based on an essential quality that every organism is born with, but on two distinct strategies that organisms use to propagate their genes. They are not born with the ability to use these strategies – they acquire that ability as they grow up, a process which produces endless variation between individuals. The biology of sex tries to classify and explain these many systems for combining DNA to make new organisms. That can be done without assigning every individual to a sex, and we will see that trying to do so quickly leads to asking questions that have no biological meaning.

While the biological definition of sex is needed to understand the diversity of life, that doesn’t mean it’s the best definition for ensuring fair competition in sport or adequate access to healthcare. We can’t expect sporting codes, medical systems and family law to adopt a definition simply because biologists find it useful. Conversely, most institutional definitions of sex break down immediately in biology, because other species contradict human assumptions about sex. The United States’ National Institutes of Health (NIH) uses a chromosomal definition of sex – XY for males and XX for females. Many reptiles, such as the terrifying saltwater crocodiles of northern Australia, don’t have any sex chromosomes, but a male saltie has no trouble telling if the crocodile that has entered his territory is a male. Even among mammals, at least five species are known that don’t have male sex chromosomes, but they develop into males just fine. Gender theorists have extensively criticised the chromosomal definition of human sexes. But however well or badly that definition works for humans, it’s an abject failure when you look at sex across the diversity of life. [...]

Nothing in the biological definition of sex requires that every organism be a member of one sex or the other. That might seem surprising, but it follows naturally from defining each sex by the ability to do one thing: to make eggs or to make sperm. Some organisms can do both, while some can’t do either. Consider the sex-switching species described above: what sex are they when they’re halfway through switching? What sex are they if something goes wrong, perhaps due to hormone-mimicking chemicals from decaying plastic waste? Once we see the development of sex as a process – and one that can be disrupted – it is inevitable that there will be many individual organisms that aren’t clearly of either sex. But that doesn’t mean that there are many biological sexes, or that biological sex is a continuum. There remain just two, distinct ways in which organisms contribute genetic material to their offspring.

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Nautilus Magazine: No, Animals Do Not Have Genders

It wasn’t until the 1950s that the psychologist John Money started using the term “gender role” to refer to something that associates with biological sex, but is not the same. From there, a theoretical distinction emerged where sex refers to facts about biological bodies. Gender, on the other hand, is cultural. It involves a set of behaviors and norms that shape how men and women act, prescribe how they ought to be, and specify what it means to be a man or a woman. These behaviors and norms emerge as a result of cultural evolution, and are transmitted to new generations through cultural learning. (Notice here that I implicitly refer to a two-gender system. I am not making a political point. This is just the most common type of system across cultures, traditionally.)

As gender theorists like Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have pointed out, sex and gender cannot be fully pulled apart. Facts about our sexed bodies influence the cultural rules surrounding gender. (For instance, in many cultures it is a norm that men, who are typically males, do jobs that require a lot of upper body strength.) And facts about gender in turn shape our sexed bodies. (For instance, norms of what is attractive lead to different patterns of exercise, like weightlifting for men and running on the elliptical for women.) And these feedback on each other. (When men only weightlift, this creates further sex differences that reinforce our cultural norms.) But despite this intertwining, peacocks still do not have genders. And the reason is that peacocks do not have culture.

How do we know that gender is not simply a biological fact? What makes it cultural, rather than analogous to sex-differentiated behavior in animals? Here is some of the key evidence. Unlike in any other animal, gendered behavior in humans is wildly different across cultures. What is considered appropriate for women in one culture might be deemed completely inappropriate in another. Even the number of genders is culturally variable. While most cultures have settled on two genders, associated with biological sex differences, others settle on three or more.

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SciShow: 6 Animals Living Their Best Lives in Cities | Synurbic Species

When humans build a city, most species in the area tend to disappear. But there are some, called synurbic species, that are living their best lives in our concrete jungles.

The Memory Palace: Freds

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99 Percent Invisible: The Natural Experiment

Usually, Fournet relies on quiet periods in an individual day to try and understand how ship noise changes whale behavior. If she’s lucky she’ll get 6-7 hours of silence, but now the ocean was about to experience months of quiet. Fournet is all set to record an entire summer of whale sounds in strangely quiet seas, “This is the first time in human history that we’ve been able to listen to truly quiet behavior,” she says. “We will finally get a baseline for what the ocean sounds like in the absence of human activity.” [...]

The shutdowns have also been incredible to researchers who study air pollution, researchers like Sarath Guttikunda. Guttikunda says that in their work they are always looking to understand the baseline air quality, like what a clean air scenario looks like. Usually, they use rainy days to do this, but the problem with rain is that it doesn’t last. “When it rains, it’s clean for one day and then the build-up starts again. But what we are seeing here is a sustained period of low numbers.” And so this shutdown feels like the entire country is running an experiment for him… a forced experiment that shows what happens if you turn many of the major sources of pollution down basically to zero.

Having this extended period of clean air is also allowing them to do more fine-tuned research experiments. Some of those experiments are chemistry experiments looking at particular pollutants like ozone. But they’re also trying to do a forensic accounting of where all this pollution is coming from because there’s actually a lot of confusion about that. And a big question people have is: is the pollution being generated inside the city, by things like cars, trash burning, and dirty cookstoves? Or is it floating in from outside sources, things like power plants and heavy industry outside the city, or farmers in the countryside who burn their fields before they replant? All of those sources are contributing to the problem but the uncertainty has allowed cities to throw up their hands and say this isn’t a problem we can solve. It allows people in power to pass the buck of responsibility. [...]

Westgate says that in the last two decades there has been a growing consensus that boredom is, in fact, a real emotion, like anger or sadness. And just like other emotions, it’s not intrinsically good or bad. Instead, it’s a signal telling you something is amiss with your situation that needs to be changed somehow. But when it comes to the question of “Why do we get bored?” — that’s where the scientific consensus ends. “When you get down to the nitty-gritty of what exactly is causing boredom, you’re going to start finding a lot of disagreement.”

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Nautilus Magazine: The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming

Typically the preparation of the animal is where you have exposure. By the time it’s cooked and prepared, the virus would have been dead. It’s more common that transmission is through the animal shedding or people slaughtering the animal, when they’re exposed to bodily fluids, blood, and secretions. With the avian influenza from poultry, a lot of the exposure and infections go back to the preparation of chicken for cooking. In Egypt, for instance, when you look at who was infected, more common than not it was a woman, directly responsible for slaughtering and preparing the animal. [...]

Certainly. We’ve been able to identify bats as reservoirs for coronaviruses and documented specific bat populations as reservoirs for Ebola virus. We want to understand how each of these bats operate within an ecosystem. Do they have certain behaviors and practices that either keep them remote from or proximal to human populations? The bat population in which we isolated the Ebola virus in West Africa was a species of bat that also tends to co-roost within human housing, so it elevates the opportunity for spillover. [...]

Yes. EcoHealth Alliance, an NGO, and others, looked at all reported outbreaks since 1940. They came to a fairly solid conclusion that we’re looking at an elevation of spillover events two to three times more than what we saw 40 years earlier. That continues to increase, driven by the huge increase in the human population and our expansion into wildlife areas. The single biggest predictor of spillover events is land-use change—more land going to agriculture and more specifically to livestock production. [...]

Oh, sure. It was predictable. It’s like if you had no traffic laws and were constantly finding pedestrians getting whacked by cars as they crossed the street. Is that surprising? No. All you need to do is to better manage how we set up crosswalks, how we establish traffic rules and regulations. We’re not doing that. We’re not establishing the kind of safe practices that will minimize the opportunity for spillover. If we better understood where these viruses are circulating and understood that ecology, we would have the potential to disrupt and minimize the risk of spillover.

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99 Percent Invisible: Shade

Shade can literally be a matter of life and death. Los Angeles, like most cities around the world, is heating up. And in dry, arid environments like LA, shade is perhaps the most important factor influencing human comfort, “even more than our temperature, more than humidity, more than wind speed,” says Bloch. Without shade, the chance of mortality, illness, and heatstroke can go way up. People become dizzy, disoriented, confused, lethargic, and dehydrated — and for the elderly or people with health issues, that can tip into more dangerous territory, like heart attacks or organ failure. Shade can literally save lives. [...]

But things changed drastically in LA after the advent of cheap electricity and the completion of the Hoover Dam. The city rebuilt itself around controlled air conditioning and car culture. Palm trees became an LA calling card. “As Mary Pickford said, [palm trees are] very good for window shopping from the seat of your car because the tree trunks aren’t that robust,” notes Bloch, but they’re also “as one essayist said, about as useful for shade as a telephone pole.” [...]

But the sidewalk isn’t the only place where LA has a shade problem. The public parks also provide very little refuge from the hot sun. Pershing Square, for example, used to be full of shade trees. But after a new underground parking structure destroyed the root system, the thick, dense tree canopy was replaced. Other parks lack trees because of a strategy Bloch has reported on called crime prevention through environmental design. In LA, there is an idea that increased visibility in public spaces will lead to higher levels of public safety. In several instances, it’s believed the LAPD has installed pole cameras in parks or in public housing projects and cut down mature trees to give the camera a clear sightline.

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BoredPanda: Teacher Stumbles Upon Baby Bears ‘Dancing’ In Finland Forest, Thinks He’s Imagining It

“The cubs behaved like little children,” Valtteri told Bored Panda. “They were playing, and even started a few friendly fights. I felt like I was on a playground in front of my house, where small children frolic around. That’s how much they reminded me of little children. At one point, the three of them got up on their hind legs and started pushing each other. It was like they were dancing in a circle.” [...]

Like the cubs have successfully proven us, bears are agile and strong. They use their forelegs very effectively for both hunting and getting around. Moreover, they’re very good swimmers and climbers. Basically, they’re the whole package. [...]

However, the fact that Valtteri managed to get such clear shots of the family is really fascinating. Bear will typically try to avoid humans as best as they can. Humans rarely see them in the wild since these animals almost always retreat immediately after detecting our presence. Keen senses and the ability to move silently make them perfect at this game of hide and seek.

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SciShow: These Adorable Wolves Play Fetch – And Defy Dogma

We thought that we taught dogs how to play fetch, but some adorable wolf pups may have just proved us wrong. Also some plants may be immortal?

BBC: Crows could be the smartest animal other than primates

Rutz is unequivocal. Some birds, like the New Caledonian crows he studies – can do remarkable things. In a paper published earlier this year, he and his co-authors described how New Caledonians seek out a specific type of plant stem from which to make their hooked tools. Experiments showed that crows found the stems they desired even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. This suggested that the birds were selecting a kind of material for their tools that they knew was just right for the job. You wouldn’t use a spanner to hammer in a nail, would you? [...]

You might think that some animals are smarter than others – with humans at the top of the proverbial tree. Certainly, humans do rely excessively on intelligence to get by. But that doesn’t mean we’re the best at every mental task. Chimps, notes Dakota McCoy at Harvard University, have been shown to possess better short-term memories than humans. This might help them to memorise where food is located in the forest canopy, for example.

Ranking the intelligence of animals seems an increasingly pointless exercise when one considers the really important thing: how well that animal is adapted to its niche. Intelligence is, first and foremost, a means towards specialisation. [...]

The crows McCoy studies have a natural curiosity, she says. They cheekily grab scientific equipment and fly off with it in the aviary. Young birds especially, she says, love to play. Humans are not so different, she argues: “We have these incredibly huge brains but we use them to do crossword puzzles – that’s not something that is evolutionarily selected for.”

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UnHerd: Let loose the lynx!

Red kite are not the only successful reintroduction of a formerly native British species. In Scotland, the sea eagle — also driven to extinction in this country 100 or so years ago — was reintroduced in the 1990s, and have started to breed. Ospreys returned naturally to Scotland and have been reintroduced to England, after being driven extinct in the 19th century.

Perhaps more spectacularly, beavers have been reintroduced in Gloucestershire, Devon and Scotland; they had been extinct in Britain for at least 250 years. Their revival has changed the waterways around there: the dams they build filter the rivers, removing silt from the water; they create big, still pools that fish, insects and amphibians can breed in and waterbirds feed from. The Devon reintroduction saw a 1,000% increase in frogspawn levels and a growth in local bat populations (they feed on the insects that bred in the ponds). Beaver dams also reduce the risk of flooding further downstream, by breaking up the flow of the river. [...]

Ross Barnett’s marvellous book The Missing Lynx tells the story of Britain’s lost megafauna, and it gets much more dramatic than red kite and beavers. There were hyenas in Yorkshire, which coexisted with humans. There were cheetahs, and lions (the bones of which were found when Trafalgar Square was being excavated); there were giant Irish elk, six foot tall at the shoulder. Mammoth, of course. Woolly rhinos. Sabre-toothed cats. Aurochs: vast great deadly wild oxen that could look a tall man in the eye. Hippos in the Thames. [...]

Wolves are generally shy of humans. There are thousands living in Spain, Germany, France, Italy, Portugal, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Poland, Russia and elsewhere. In some of those countries, they are protected as endangered species; in others, they are not, and in Bulgaria they have a bounty on their heads as though it were the late middle ages all over again. (In Russia, wolves in the south-east are under pressure and occasionally eaten by the increasing tiger population, because Russia is extremely hardcore.)

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The Guardian: 'Amused us for years': Rob the unappealing albatross finally finds a mate

Rob, 35 and named after the red, orange and blue bands around his leg, is part of the world’s only mainland breeding colony of royal albatross – majestic birds with wingspans of about three metres – at Taiaroa Heads on the Otago peninsula, near the bottom of the South Island. [...]

Four of Rob’s previous partners have died, while others have not stuck – and no one knows why. Langsbury noted that the dating pool was small, with about 200 adults in the colony. [...]

Langsbury hoped Rob, who has raised three chicks so far, would breed with his new partner, who also had a chequered relationship history. “She’s a successful breeder,” he said. “She’ll know what to do.”

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euronews: Watch: Scientists have taught rats to drive - and they love it

A team of researchers at the University of Richmond have taught rats to drive mini-cars - and not only are the rodents good at it, they enjoy it too. [...]

The study found that the rats actually felt more relaxed after driving, with heightened levels of dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), the hormone that counteracts stress. [...]

That result was reinforced when the rats were given ‘passengers’, with researchers noting that only the animals actually driving the car saw a decrease in stress.

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Aeon: The pointing ape

We last shared a common ancestor with the other great apes around 6 or 7 million years ago. Yet our brains were, essentially, ape-sized until around 2 million years ago, and did not reach contemporary proportions until sometime within the past 200,000 years. Material evidence suggests that humans used ochre to make drawings on rocks only within the past 75,000 years; and representational objects began to appear in the archaeological record about 40,000 years ago. Unfortunately, speech and gesture do not fossilise, but if we consider that no ape can speak (beyond a tiny handful of laboriously produced utterances) and if we assume that language requires a brain larger than an ape’s, we can define a window of time between, roughly, 2 million years ago and 40,000 years ago in which spoken language emerged. Based on a range of data from archaeological to neurophysiological, the computational neuroscientist Michael Arbib estimates this window at around 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago. Somewhere in this time span, we became qualitatively distinct from all other animals by any reasonable measure. [...]

One day, I came back to Clint’s cage and saw him point with his index finger at a grape that had fallen on the floor, due to a technical problem with the automated reward-delivery system. The grape was out of his reach, and he pointed to it, making loud raspberry sounds (like a Bronx cheer), looking back-and-forth between me and the fruit. Now, you don’t need a PhD in experimental psychology to be able to interpret this signalling behaviour, right? However, without significant indoctrination into late 20th-century intellectual fashions you might not realise that Clint’s pointing was, at the time, theoretically impossible. Almost everybody knew, at that time, that human pointing – this ability to capture and redirect the attention of another being to a specific entity – was part of our unique adaptation for language. In language, we refer to things with words. We say, for example: ‘Look at the dog!’ or ‘I think that blue car is following us.’ Symbolic reference seems easy enough as we speak in daily interactions, but hop on a plane and travel somewhere where people don’t speak your language, and the same words just don’t work for us the way they do back home. This is because languages are, for the most part, mutually unintelligible. The whole system breaks down if we don’t have a shared symbolic code. But pointing will often work to establish joint reference.

This highlights different kinds of reference. In speech, there is a mostly arbitrary relationship between a symbol and the thing it refers to. The word ‘big’ is not bigger than the word ‘little’, for example. The word ‘dog’ does not sound like a dog, and so on. In contrast, the relationship between a pointing gesture and its referent is not arbitrary – the pointing hand acts like a geometric ray, so that while a point might not usually resemble the referent, it nevertheless has a spatial relationship with it. Pointing is an interactive skill in human infancy. Children begin to follow pointing gestures to targets in their fields of view by about nine months of age; by approximately 12 months of age, they can follow points to more distant objects or locales. Children also begin to produce pointing gestures for others, at roughly the same age that they begin to speak, around the end of their first year of life. [...]

What this means for understanding the evolution of language is that our ancestors didn’t have to evolve a specialised manual gesture to foster language acquisition in that window of time when language or protolanguage originally appeared, 1.5 million to 100,000 years ago. Our ancestors who invented language were already pre-adapted for pointing, and as our infants became ever more helpless for ever longer periods of early development, pointing became an increasingly useful tool for social manipulation in our species.

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Aeon: An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have

A red wood ant colony remembers its trail system leading to the same trees, year after year, although no single ant does. In the forests of Europe, they forage in high trees to feed on the excretions of aphids that in turn feed on the tree. Their nests are enormous mounds of pine needles situated in the same place for decades, occupied by many generations of colonies. Each ant tends to take the same trail day after day to the same tree. During the long winter, the ants huddle together under the snow. The Finnish myrmecologist Rainer Rosengren showed that when the ants emerge in the spring, an older ant goes out with a young one along the older ant’s habitual trail. The older ant dies and the younger ant adopts that trail as its own, thus leading the colony to remember, or reproduce, the previous year’s trails. [...]

From day to day, the colony’s behaviour changes, and what happens on one day affects the next. I conducted a series of perturbation experiments. I put out toothpicks that the workers had to move away, or blocked the trails so that foragers had to work harder, or created a disturbance that the patrollers tried to repel. Each experiment affected only one group of workers directly, but the activity of other groups of workers changed, because workers of one task decide whether to be active depending on their rate of brief encounters with workers of other tasks. After just a few days repeating the experiment, the colonies continued to behave as they did while they were disturbed, even after the perturbations stopped. Ants had switched tasks and positions in the nest, and so the patterns of encounter took a while to shift back to the undisturbed state. No individual ant remembered anything but, in some sense, the colony did. [...]

Ants use the rate at which they meet and smell other ants, or the chemicals deposited by other ants, to decide what to do next. A neuron uses the rate at which it is stimulated by other neurons to decide whether to fire. In both cases, memory arises from changes in how ants or neurons connect and stimulate each other. It is likely that colony behaviour matures because colony size changes the rates of interaction among ants. In an older, larger colony, each ant has more ants to meet than in a younger, smaller one, and the outcome is a more stable dynamic. Perhaps colonies remember a past disturbance because it shifted the location of ants, leading to new patterns of interaction, which might even reinforce the new behaviour overnight while the colony is inactive, just as our own memories are consolidated during sleep. Changes in colony behaviour due to past events are not the simple sum of ant memories, just as changes in what we remember, and what we say or do, are not a simple set of transformations, neuron by neuron. Instead, your memories are like an ant colony’s: no particular neuron remembers anything although your brain does.

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Nautilus Magazine: What Color Really Evolved For

These studies also have further implications. For one, the finding that melanosomes are so common inside animals’ bodies may overhaul our very understanding of melanin’s function, says McNamara. “There’s the potential that melanin didn’t evolve for color at all,” she said. “That role may actually be secondary to much more important physiological functions.” Her research indicates that it may have an important role in homeostasis, or regulation of the internal chemical and physical state of the body, and the balance of its metallic elements. “A big question now is does this apply to the first, most primitive vertebrates?” said McNamara. “Can we find fossil evidence of this? Which function of melanin is evolutionarily primitive—production of color or homeostasis?”

At the same time, the findings imply that we may need to review our understanding of the colors of ancient animals. That’s because fossil melanosomes previously assumed to represent external hues may in fact be from internal tissues, especially if the fossil has been disturbed over time. McNamara says her research has also shown that melanosomes can change shape and shrink over the course of millions of years, potentially affecting color reconstructions. [...]

Shawkey is looking into such questions, with one of his recent studies indicating that the wing color of birds may play an important role in flight efficiency by leading to different rates of heating. “What started as a novelty of deciphering dinosaur colors has turned into a very serious field which is studying the origins of key pigment systems, how the evolution of colorful structures may have helped drive major evolutionary transitions like the origin of flight, and how color is related to ecology and sexual selection,” said Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate paleontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh. “When I was growing up, so many of the dinosaur books I read in school said that we would never know what color they were. But as is so often the case in science, it was silly to treat this as impossible.”

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Atlas Pro: The Geography of Pets

Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Origin of Consciousness – How Unaware Things Became Aware

Consciousness is perhaps the biggest riddle in nature. In the first part of this three part video series, we explore the origins of consciousness and take a closer look on how unaware things became aware.

The Conversation: Bees and butterflies are under threat from urbanisation – here’s how city-dwellers can help

It’s alarming, then, that pollinators are under threat from factors including more intense farming, climate change, disease and changing land use, such as urbanisation. Yet recent studies have suggested that urban areas could actually be beneficial, at least for some pollinators, as higher numbers of bee species have been recorded in UK towns and cities, compared with neighbouring farmland.  [...]

We also recorded high numbers of pollinating insects in gardens. Residential gardens made up between a quarter and a third of the total area of the four cities we sampled, so they’re really a crucial habitat for bees and other pollinators in cities. That’s why urban planners and developers need to create new housing developments with gardens. [...]

Rather than paving, decking and neatly mown lawns, gardeners need to be planting flowers, shrubs and bushes that are good for pollinators. Choose plants that have plenty of pollen and nectar that is accessible to pollinators, and aim to have flowers throughout the year to provide a constant supply of food. Our research suggests that borage and lavender are particularly attractive for pollinators.[...]

Parks, road verges and other green spaces make up around a third of cities, however our study found that they contain far fewer pollinators than gardens. Our results suggest that increasing the numbers of flowers in these areas, potentially by mowing less often, could have a real benefit for pollinators (and save money). There are already several initiatives underway to encourage local authorities to mow less often.

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