By Emma Korntheuer

Picture your kitchen. The dried and canned goods in your cabinets, the produce in your fridge, perhaps a fruit basket perched on the counter. Imagine one day waking up and facing a reality in which one third of your food simply ceases to exist. What will you lose?

Globally, bees are responsible for 35% of our food supply, with many everyday crops relying on insect pollination to produce our fruits, vegetables, and nuts (NRCS, 2020). …

By Erica Kono

You wake up on a calm Saturday morning and look out the window. Out in the distance, you see a tree. You gaze at it vacantly, observing its leafless remains. It has been completely engulfed in water. You’re living on stilts, and the water quickly approaches year after year in the hopes to claim your home as well.

For those who live on the coast of Louisiana, this has become their chilling reality.

What’s happening in Louisiana?

The stars must have aligned (in a bad way) because this boot-shaped state has been hit with a multitude of problems, including subsidence (sinking land), reduced sediment replenishment, land erosion, sea-level rise, and saltwater intrusion. In the last 80 years, Louisiana has lost over 4,800 square kilometers of land. In the next 50 years, that number is expected to increase to over 10,000 square kilometers. Losing this amount of land not only affects the area’s wildlife and economy, but it also makes these areas more prone to environmental hazards, such as storm surges, floods, and weather-related events. …

By Breanna Kellogg

The Blue Paradox

In order to make effective policies for people, you have to understand how people work. Without much doubt, people respond to incentives, and environmental policymakers use these responses to implement environmental measures and construct a more positive human and ecosystem relationship. However, this incentive driven outlook can backfire when it comes to announcing a new policy. When people hear about an upcoming policy change and potential restrictions, people rush in and do as much as they can beforehand, undermining the purpose of the policy in the first place. This has been a problem that environmentalists face with the announcements of new reserves, land developments, climate change policies, and various other measures that causes much of the public to rush to extort instead of rally behind. One prominent example is with the US endangered Species Act of 1973, which saw declines in red-cockaded woodpecker habitats due to deforestation from people that didn’t want to pay the cost of land-use restrictions on their properties near these habitats once the policy was implemented. This phenomenon is coined the “green paradox”- where the anticipation of policies put in place to lessen problems created from humans are causing humans to be incentivized to make the problem even worse beforehand. …

By Mackenzie Kawahara

There are currently millions of people, many of which have never heard of or even seen a horseshoe crab in their lifetime, that have been protected by horseshoe crab blood. Commonly called the “living fossil,” horseshoe crabs have been able to survive nearly unchanged for the past 200 million years. These ancient aquatic arthropods are more closely related to scorpions and spiders than to actual crab, and they currently only have four living species in the entire world, but their numbers are in decline (Mohamad et al. 2019). As of 2019, the Indo-West Pacific horseshoe crab species, Tachypleus tridentatus (T. tridentatus), has been deemed “Endangered” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species (Krisfalusi-Gannon et al. …

By Emiko Inouye

Europe may be facing a shortage of a very odd, sometimes unpleasant, often unwanted good: insects.

Recent evidence suggests that insect abundance is trending downwards. While that may sound like good news on its surface, it brings trouble for the many species of birds that rely on insects as their primary food source. Species like the Common Grasshopper Warbler, Northern Wheatear, and Meadow Pipit — all of which weigh less than an ounce as adults — are European insect-eaters that are seeming to struggle to keep their populations up in recent years. …

By Meredith Honig

As Prince William, president of United for Wildlife, recently stated, “The humble pangolin…runs the risk of becoming extinct before most of us have even heard of them.”

Pangolins are the only mammal in the world completely covered in scales from head to tail. They are fully toothless, surviving primarily on termites and are thought to play an important role in insect population regulation. Even with such a distinct body of armor and diet, many people are unaware of their existence and they are highly understudied in science. …

By Logan Hamilton

Chances are that the vanilla you find in your ice cream comes from Madagascar- nearly 80% of the world’s vanilla gets produced there. Madagascar is also home to the lemurs- a group of primates that live only on Madagascar. At least, they do for now- wild habitats across the globe are being lost to human activities, and Madagascar is no exception. In fact, nearly all species of lemur are at risk of extinction thanks to habitat loss, hunting for bushmeat, and the pet trade.

But there is a silver lining- maybe it’s better to call it a vanilla lining, since vanilla plantations in Madagascar provide hope for these adorable primates. A study by Hending and colleagues showed that some lemurs can be found in vanilla plantations, suggesting that these croplands may be used in future conservation management. …

By: Colette Goodrich

Scientists found a new way to make conserving species easier, and cheaper! Many conservation scientists are concerned for endangered species. Numerous efforts are made in order to understand population sizes and interactions of endangered species so that scientists can do their best to conserve the species. One problem however, is that endangered species are not allowed to be touched or manipulated in any way that could possibly cause them stress. Scientists can now gather and record data from faeces, shells, feathers, hair and saliva that is left behind after the animal. Before, quality information could not come from such means. …