Matthew Ponsford

Across South America, canopy bridges evolve as a lifeline for tree-dwelling wildlife Throughout the Amazon Rainforest, forest fragmentation represents an escalating and existential threat to the preservation of fauna. Driven by intensive economic development, the expansion of agribusi...

#Primates 👍

What can biodiversity patterns during the Black Death tell us about our relationships with nature?

(hint: its not all bad!)

Read more in our new paper: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

🌏🧪🌐

Mute Swan (Cygnus olor) nesting on a small pond island in one of Prague’s largest parks, Czechia (photo credit: Peter Mikula; 24 April 2021)

Anthropogenic change is causing behavioral traits to converge across individuals, populations, and species, often in urban environments. @birder158.bsky.social &co describe these changes and discusses their ecological and evolutionary consequences.
🧪 #EcoSky #GlobalChangeBiology
plos.io/4b6FcRb

This Brazilian frog might be the first pollinating amphibian known to science Nectar-loving tree frog likely moves pollen from flower to flower

It’s the first time a frog—or any amphibian—has been observed pollinating a plant, researchers reported in 2023.

Learn more on #WorldWildlifeDay: https://scim.ag/4riUU1G

"When a Bayesian agent is provided with data that are sampled based on a current hypothesis the agent becomes increasingly confident about the hypothesis but does not make any progress towards the truth."

#TheStupidestTimeline

Opinion | The Whooping Crane Recovery Shows What We Stand to Lose

*Gift article* A good news article, which I figure we all can use about now. "As it turns out, when you see a whooping crane, you cannot doubt you are seeing one. No other living thing like it exists in all the world."
#Birds #Wetlands #EnvironmentalProtection #EndangeredSpecies

Chronic ocean heating fuels ‘staggering’ loss of marine life, study finds Fish levels fall by 7.2% with as little as 0.1C of warming per decade, northern hemisphere research shows

Chronic ocean heating fuels ‘staggering’ loss of marine life, study finds
Fish levels fall by 7.2% with as little as 0.1C of warming per decade, northern hemisphere research shows www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Artek purchases Finnish forest to protect biodiversity and secure future birch supply - Artek

"The company has purchased an area of forestland in Heinävesi, Eastern Finland, which it will manage using environmentally progressive methods."

A Finnish high-end wood design company has to acquire its own forests, because the Finnish forestry model produces slop.

www.artek.fi/en/news/arte...

Wilding For Conservation: an exploration of rewilding in Britain - British Wildlife Wilding For Conservation: an exploration of rewilding in Britain Between the years of 2021 and 2025, British Wildlife magazine ran a series of articles under the title of ‘Wilding for Conservation’. T...

My review in their latest newsletter of @britishwildlife.bsky.social Wilding for Conservation is now out.
www.britishwildlife.com/wilding-for-... An important publication & resource.
@landethics.bsky.social @irishrainforest.bsky.social @whittledaway.bsky.social @jmbecologist.bsky.social #rewilding

A burrowing owl looking shocked and surprised as it is either removed or placed into an artificial burrow by a human hand

I am working on a story about burrowing owls and came across this delightful photo

Source: www.aza.org/connect-stor...

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations

Leading AIs from OpenAI, Anthropic and Google opted to use nuclear weapons in simulated war games in 95 per cent of cases

www.newscientist.com/article/2516...

Macro photo of a brown stink bug in face view on a leaf, guarding a tightly-clustered bunch of eggs that are shaped and colored exactly like a full tray of dark beer with foam on top.

Finally, the bug is back with a round of the Guinness.

A bumper berry harvest has New Zealand's weird flightless parrot in a rare mood for romance New Zealand conservationists have been fighting for years to keep the kakapo, the world’s only flightless parrot, from disappearing, with intensive conservation efforts.

Something positive for your scrolling today: Apparently kakapo are having a great year. apnews.com/article/kaka...

A UK climate security report backed by the intelligence services was quietly buried – a pattern we’ve seen many times before Governments have been warned about climate change for 70 years. They’re still suppressing the worst news.

An alarming UK climate security report backed by the intelligence services has been quietly buried.

Our governments are not taking the climate crisis seriously.

theconversation.com/a-uk-climate...

Bernd & Hilla Becher show at Spruth Magers in London is phenomenal.

Matching sounds to shapes: Evidence of the bouba-kiki effect in naïve baby chicks Maria Loconsole1*, Silvia Benavides-Varela2,3, Lucia Regolin1 Humans across multiple languages spontaneously associate the nonwords “kiki” and “bouba” with spiky and round shapes, respectively, a phenomenon named the bouba-kiki effect. To explore the origin of this association, and whether it is unique to humans, we tested the bouba-kiki effect in baby domestic chickens (Gallus gallus). as a precocial species, chicks can be tested shortly after hatching, allowing us to control their pretest experiences. Similar to humans, both 3-day-old [experiment 1 (exp. 1)] and 1-day-old (exp. 2) chicks spontaneously choose a spiky shape when hearing the “kiki” sound and a round shape when hearing the “bouba” sound. results from naïve young animals suggest a predisposed mechanism for matching the dimensions of shape and sound, which may be widespread across species.

main fig from the paper showing the association between bouba/round and kiki/spiky in newborn chicks

the new paper on bouba/kiki in chicks is utterly compelling

canonical, elegant method from comparative cogsci & its partner in developmental science, ultra-simple design, ultra-clear effects, no need for fancy analyses, machine learning, or AI

it appeared in an appropriately badass venue (Science)

AN INTRODUCTION TO FORAMINIFERA The Foraminiferida are an important group of single celled protozoa.  There are an estimated 8,000 species living in the world’s oceans today, among  the sea floor and the marine plankton and compr…

AN INTRODUCTION TO FORAMINIFERA paleonerdish.wordpress.com/2013/06/17/a...

“If you removed all people from the planet, Hawaii would be on a completely different evolutionary ecological trajectory". This article by @interspecies.agency explains how Hawaii's so-called ‘freakosystems’ offer an unsettling glimpse of the future. www.bbc.com/future/artic...

NGO Uses Hair To Help Restore Mexico City's Agricultural Islands For centuries, farmers in southern Mexico City have cultivated "chinampas", agricultural islands first developed in pre-Hispanic times and still in use today. But water contamination is an increasing ...

Ever since I started partnering with Matter of Trust, I’ve been fascinated by this technology. Our bodies are fields that naturally produce things to help nature thrive.

Glacier grafting: How an Indigenous art is countering water scarcity Residents in the northern part of Pakistan are creating artificial glaciers to tackle climate change.

The importance of Indigenous knowledge for finding creative solutions to impacts of the climate crisis: www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/...

Impacts of large herbivores on mycorrhizal fungal communities across the Arctic Mycorrhizal fungi play an integral role in nutrient and carbon cycling in soils, which may be especially important in the Arctic, one of the world's most soil carbon-rich regions. Large mammalian her...

🚨New paper in @ecography.bsky.social! First Pan-Arctic study on how large herbivore exclusion shapes mycorrhizal fungi, brilliantly led by @colebrachmann.bsky.social. Key insight: AM fungi—often overlooked in Arctic research—respond most strongly to herbivory while EcM and ErM vary locally. Thread 👇

This GOOD BOY ran onto the course during the Women’s Cross-Country Skiing Team Sprint event, crossing the finish line and being automatically recorded by OMEGA’s photofinish camera 😆

There are lots of climate journalists around, myself included.

If you want more reporting on climate, try sharing our stuff, write to editors and demand more such reporting, etc - basically, give them an audience they can't refuse.

Using our bee-tracking drone, we discovered that honey bees 🐝 have highly precise and individual routes. Now published at @currentbiology.bsky.social : doi.org/10.1016/j.cu...

A map showing the probability of movement for terrestrial animals across Canada and the USA.

Now published: Landscape connectivity across Canada and the USA. A seamless, high resolution connectivity map across both countries. 🧪🌎 Open access in Facets, including open data www.facetsjournal.com/doi/full/10....

UK ban on Palestine Action unlawful, high court judges rule Protest group’s co-founder wins legal challenge against decision to proscribe it under anti-terrorism laws

Wow!

Palestine Action win judicial review - Guardian report.

This is a *big* legal win.

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

How do you grow a thousand-year-old tree without waiting a thousand years? As @interspecies.agency writes, ecologists are trying to build a kind of time machine, making younger trees acquire in decades the ecological richness that normally takes centuries. www.noemamag.com/how-to-build...

The making of novel ecosystems: A process‐based framework for measurement, analysis and application Ecological novelty is emerging rapidly due to global change drivers such as climate shifts, species introductions, defaunation, and land-use transformation. These changes challenge how we assess, ...

🌍In a new @econovoau.bsky.social paper in Methods in Ecology & Evolution, led by @mattkerr.bsky.social, we present a process-based framework linking compositional, functional, abiotic & social dimensions of novel ecosystem trajectories♨️🌿 besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Rodent burrows offer unusual sanctuary to Africa’s smallest wildcat Under cover of night, a black-footed cat moves almost invisibly through the grasses of southern Namibia, hunting small rodents, birds and insects. Barely a third the size of a domestic cat, its tawny…

Female black-footed cat depend on abandoned springhare burrows to raise kittens, rotating dens to avoid predators.

With only ~10,000 left, protecting these burrows — and the livestock landscapes where they occur — is key to the species’ survival.

I have a soft spot for gorse but like the look of this. Most drones/unmanned vehicles in conservation are not that useful — anyone know if this is any good?