Falling insect species

Insects are dying at a high rate every year, but it is difficult to estimate an accurate number, because it is a challenge to gather data for millions of species around the world. In a new-to-me series, Reuters broke it down:

The world has lost 5% to 10% of all insect species in the last 150 years — or between 250,000 and 500,000 species, according to a February 2020 study in the journal Biological Conservation. Those losses are continuing, though estimates vary due to patchy data as well as uncertainty over how many insects exist.

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Animal extinction over time

Animals are going extinct at a faster rate. Reuters shows a developing pattern across species:

Losing hundreds of species over 500 or so years may not seem significant when there are millions more still living on the planet. But in fact, the speed at which species are now vanishing is unprecedented in the last 10 million years.

“We are losing species now faster than they can evolve,” O’Brien said.

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Disappearing animals as a matrix of dots

Reddit user WhiteCheeks used dot density to show population counts of various animals. Each dot represents an animal. So animals with lower counts show less obviously.

This is similar to the use of pixelation to show endangered species, which I think works better since the size of the dots above don’t encode anything.

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The Deer That’s Trapped in Conservation Limbo

0000-0002-8715-2896Photo: Julie Larsen Maher © WCS. In April, the Bronx Zoo welcomed four little bundles of joy: two male and two female Père David’s deer fawns (see a video of the new additions here). It’s

This is How Research Gender-Bias Bias Works

Fighting-bias-with-bias-690x3200000-0002-8715-2896Source: This is How Research Gender-Bias Bias Works   But how can you tell? She wanted to know why I said some work on gender bias was obviously too biased to be reliable. Bamini Jayabalasingham and

PLOS 2015 Reviewer Thank You

Thank-you-image-690x3202016 is shaping up to be a notable year for PLOS; it’s the organization’s 15th Anniversary of its founding as a nonprofit and the 10th Anniversary of the groundbreaking journal PLOS ONE. Before looking too far

190 million years of tetrapod biodiversity

Tetrapod is the name given to any vertebrate animal with four (tetra) legs (pod). There are more than 30,000 living species of tetrapod known today, and this includes many of the animals we are familiar

Wikipedia Activism and Diversity in Science

There’s no getting around it. A lot of scientists are white men, and it’s always been that way. But it’s never been the whole picture. Getting a better picture of scientists whose work or lives

Gone Fishin’ in the Cretaceous: A New Species of Acanthomorph from Canada

fishFiguring out fish relationships is no small feat. From Near et al. 2013) For being one of the largest groups of vertebrates, and having one of the richer fossil records among organisms, the relationships of

Should we eliminate all mosquitoes from the planet?

Made a storify based on a discussion about a new Slate article: