While humans are able to understand much about causality, it is unclear to what extent non-human animals can do the same. The Aesop's Fable paradigm requires an animal to drop stones into a water-filled tube to bring a floating food reward within reach. Rook, Eurasian jay, and New Caledonian crow performances are similar to those of children under seven years of age when solving this task. However, we know very little about the cognition underpinning these birds' performances.

Mortality and injuries caused by ship strikes in U.S. waters are a cause of concern for the endangered population of blue whales (Balaenoptera musculus) occupying the eastern North Pacific. We sought to determine which areas along the U.S. West Coast are most important to blue whales and whether those areas change inter-annually. Argos-monitored satellite tags were attached to 171 blue whales off California during summer/early fall from 1993 to 2008. We analyzed portions of the tracks that occurred within U.S.

In recent decades, coral reef ecosystems have declined to the extent that reefs are now threatened globally. While many water quality parameters have been proposed to contribute to reef declines, little evidence exists conclusively linking specific water quality parameters with increased disease prevalence in situ. Here we report evidence from in situ coral health surveys confirming that chronic exposure to dredging-associated sediment plumes significantly increase the prevalence of white syndromes, a devastating group of globally important coral diseases.

The native forests of Borneo have been impacted by selective logging, fire, and conversion to plantations at unprecedented scales since industrial-scale extractive industries began in the early 1970s. There is no island-wide documentation of forest clearance or logging since the 1970s. This creates an information gap for conservation planning, especially with regard to selectively logged forests that maintain high conservation potential.

Habitat fragmentation of freshwater ecosystems is increasing rapidly, however the understanding of extinction debt and species decline in riverine habitat fragments lags behind that in other ecosystems. The mighty rivers that drain the Himalaya - the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Indus, Mekong and Yangtze - are amongst the world’s most biodiverse freshwater ecosystems. Many hundreds of dams have been constructed, are under construction, or are planned on these rivers and large hydrological changes and losses of biodiversity have occurred and are expected to continue.

Intense urban and agricultural development alters habitats, increases fragmentation, and may decouple trophic interactions if plants or animals cannot disperse to needed resources. Specialist insects represent a substantial proportion of global biodiversity and their fidelity to discrete microhabitats provides a powerful framework for investigating organismal responses to human land use.

The objective of the study was to describe the attitudes, beliefs, and practices of U.S. obstetricians on the topic of prenatal environmental exposures.

White sharks are highly migratory and segregate by sex, age and size. Unlike marine mammals, they neither surface to breathe nor frequent haul-out sites, hindering generation of abundance data required to estimate population size. A recent tag-recapture study used photographic identifications of white sharks at two aggregation sites to estimate abundance in “central California” at 219 mature and sub-adult individuals. They concluded this represented approximately one-half of the total abundance of mature and sub-adult sharks in the entire eastern North Pacific Ocean (ENP).

Despite recent advances in field research on white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias) in several regions around the world, opportunistic capture and sighting records remain the primary source of information on this species in the northwest Atlantic Ocean (NWA). Previous studies using limited datasets have suggested a precipitous decline in the abundance of white sharks from this region, but considerable uncertainty in these studies warrants additional investigation.

Neanderthal dietary reconstructions have, to date, been based on indirect evidence and may underestimate the significance of plants as a food source. While zooarchaeological and stable isotope data have conveyed an image of Neanderthals as largely carnivorous, studies on dental calculus and scattered palaeobotanical evidence suggest some degree of contribution of plants to their diet. However, both views remain plausible and there is no categorical indication of an omnivorous diet.