One whale’s waste is an ocean organism’s treasure

The nutrients in the ocean are not evenly distributed. Resources tend to be rich around coastlines and near the poles, and are often poorer in the open ocean and the tropics. A new study has explored how urine from migrating baleen whales is a significant way that nitrogen and other nutrients are circulated in the oceans. Joe Roman is a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont. He led the research, published in the journal Nature Communications.

The underground economy: Fungi and plants trade have a network under our feet

Scientists have used a custom robot to track the growth of a complex underground supply-chain network that forms between more than 80 per cent of the plant species on Earth and symbiotic fungus. This allowed them to trace the flow of carbon and nutrients across this network, that draws about 13 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the soil each year. Toby Kiers, from Vrije University in Amsterdam and the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks led the work, published in the journal Nature.

Researchers capture wild sharks to get sperm samples for captive breeding

In a world-first, a team of marine biologists and veterinarians collected semen from endangered wildsharks in an effort to maintain a population of genetically healthy sharks. Christine Dudgeon, from the University of Queensland and the Sunshine Coast and the Biopixel Oceans Foundation, used some of that sperm to artificially inseminate captive females.

Watching planets form in a baby solar system

370 light years away, around a newborn star only five million years old, two planets are forming from the disk of gas and dust still orbiting around the star. Canadian researchers are using instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope to observe this process, and understand how the nascent planets are competing with the star for material as they grow. Dori Blakely, a PhD candidate at the University of Victoria, was the lead researcher on this article published in The Astronomical Journal.

Butterfly populations are declining. Meet the people moving a forest to save them.

A new study is bringing hard data to help us understand how butterfly numbers have declined steeply in recent years, due to the combination of habitat loss, climate change, and pesticide exposure. The research, co-led by Elise Zipkin, found that overall, across the United States, butterfly numbers are down 22 per cent over the past 20 years. The research was published in the journal Science.

A different group of scientists is hoping to fix at least one of these problems for one species, by moving an entire forest in Mexico. The sacred fir trees, where monarch butterflies spend their winters, are struggling under climate change. Recently a team of researchers planted a thousand sacred fir trees at a new location at higher elevations to kickstart a new, future-proof forest for the butterflies to overwinter. After a few years, the researchers report the trees are doing well, in a recent paper published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change.

Quirks producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke to Cuauhtémoc Saénz Romero, a forest geneticist at the University of Michoacán in Mexico, and Greg O'Neill, a climate change adaptation scientist with the BC Provincial Government in the Ministry of Forests.

Your English Five a Day #48.1