1 . It is not always easy to understand animal behavior, especially when it’s related to other species (物种). For decades, researchers have observed orca (虎鲸) attacking and even killing porpoises (鼠海豚) in the Pacific Northwest. But it confuses people that these expert hunters don’t eat them. So what’s going on here?

Southern Resident orcas are a different population of orcas that live in the Pacific Northwest. The lives of these orcas are closely tied to those of the salmon (鲑鱼). So if the salmon disappear, so too will the orca. But despite their preference for salmon, these whales are known to attack and kill other smaller marine mammals (海洋哺乳动物) without eating them.

To better understand this unusual behavior, an international team of researchers did a research and examined more than 60 years of recorded interactions between Southern Resident orcas and porpoises in the Salish Sea.

“Why don’t the Southern Residents just eat porpoises instead?” Deborah Giles of Wild Orca said. “It’s because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been a guess until now.”

According to Giles and her colleagues’work, the orca may be attacking the porpoise as a form of social play. It is possible these large animals may be attacking the smaller mammals as a way to build up social cohesion (凝聚力). Similarly, the behavior could represent hunting practice, by which the orcas are practising their teamwork and cooperation skills for hunting salmon. Finally, the behavior could be a way of “mismothering” where the orca see the smaller porpoises as weaker or ill and so in need of care.

This work highlights the need for the protection of salmon populations in the area as well as the orcas’entire hunting range. The threat (威胁) to the salmon’s future is not just a threat to a single species, but an entire ecosystem.

3 . High-resolution (高分辨率) satellite imagery has been used to map every single tree in Africa, showing a technique that could help improve the monitoring of deforestation (森林砍伐) across the world. Florian Reiner at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and his colleagues used images from sate lies to map canopy (树冠) across the entire African continent.

Modern sate lies usually catch tree canopies at a resolution of 30 meters — fine for measuring the size of forests, but less good at mapping individual trees. The satellite data Reiner and his colleagues used had a resolution of 3 meters, enabling the study to map all trees, including those not part of a forest.

The results suggest that 30 percent of all trees in Africa aren’t in a forest and instead are across farmland, savannah and urban areas. “Many countries in Africa lack thick forests, but have a lot of trees.” says Reiner. “These trees are extremely important to the local ecosystems, the people and the economy. By tracking every single tree, researchers can start to monitor how these trees are coping with climate change or whether they are sensitive to deforestation.” It could also improve the monitoring of reforestation efforts, which are growing in popularity as a way of removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

“At a local level, being able to consistently monitor when and where trees are disappearing or reappearing can lead to more actionable insights,” says John Francis at the Alan Turing Institute in London.

“The study is a proof of concept rather than a map ready for immediate commercial use,” says Reiner. “It’s research work. It’s showing what could be done,” he says. But he is already working with colleagues to scale up the tracking approach to cover the entire global canopy: “We’re hoping that this will be seen as a way forward in monitoring tree resources.”

China’s first-ever college     1     (devote) to the study of giant pandas was inaugurated (揭牌成立) in Nanchong, Sichuan province, on Monday. The college was     2     (joint) established by the Forestry and Grassland Bureau of Sichuan province and China West Normal University in Nanchong.

Giant pandas, a species unique     3     China, are globally recognized as the “flagship species” of the world’s biodiversity conservation. They serve as     4     cultural symbol for Sichuan, home to the majority of the world’s wild pandas.

The college is intended     5     (play) a crucial role in protecting the ecological environment, restoring habitats, constructing a     6     (nation) park of pandas, promoting panda population recovery, facilitating reintroduction into the wild, as well as conducting research and publicizing panda culture.

Since the 1970s, the university has been committed to giant panda research, and     7    (create) “four firsts” in this field, according to the university’s Party chief Wang Yuanjun. The university led the country’s first giant panda field     8     (investigate) and research, established the world’s first giant panda field ecological observation station, promoted China’s first international cooperation on wildlife protection,     9     published the world’s first academic monograph (学术专著)     10     comprehensively explores the ecological environment of giant pandas.

6 . A Danish company named Too Good To Go has been working to combat food waste in the United States and around the world. In the U. S., more than a third of food produced goes uneaten, contributing to environmental issues. Too Good To Go addresses this problem by partnering with restaurants to sell their end-of-day leftovers at discounts, typically ranging from 60% to 80% off.

The app of the same name, which started in Denmark in 2015, has expanded to 17 countries and multiple U. S. cities, including New York, Phoenix, and Seattle, with Los Angeles proving to be one of its most successful markets. The company is now looking to expand its footprint in the southeast.

While the cost savings for customers and businesses are significant, the primary focus of Too Good To Go is reducing food waste, which is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The app allows users to track their environmental impact by displaying the electricity and carbon emissions prevented through their purchases. To date, the app claims to have saved over 250 million meals, making a substantial impact.

Food waste contributes to climate change in several ways, including the emission of methane gas from rotting food in landfills, the resources used to grow the food, and the energy expended in food transportation and preparation. Too Good To Go estimates that its efforts are equal to taking about 135, 000 cars off the road for a year, and it plays a crucial role in addressing the approximately 6% of total greenhouse gas emissions caused by food loss and waste in the U. S.

Alexandria Coari, the vice president of food waste nonprofit ReFED, recognizes the potential of apps like Too Good To Go. She believes that they have the capacity to reduce the carbon emissions equal to 870, 000 cars in a year, positioning them as one of the top 10 solutions to combating food waste and climate change.

While the app has been successful in the restaurant industry, its expansion into grocery stores and manufacturing is still a work in progress.

10 . While many animal populations seem to dwindle, one species that is moving in the opposite direction of such loss is America’s native wildlife — wood stork.

The wood stork is the only stork that breeds in North America. In 1984, it was declared an endangered species after its population decreased sharply to just 5,000 mating pairs. At the time, scientists predicted that the bird would become completely extinct by 2000. Today, it numbers 10,000 mating pairs, and the Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing a delisting of the wood stork as an endangered species. So how did the population bounce back?

The success is in part down to the resourcefulness of the wood stork. The wood stork’s native home was in the Everglades in Florida, but it migrated north as the Everglades were being destroyed by development of mankind. Wetland preservation and restoration, protection of nesting areas, and management of water flows began with the approval of the wood stork’s first recovery plan in 1986. In the following year, former Savannah Coastal Refuges biologist John Robinette noticed stork nests in Georgia as stork populations moved to safer wetlands.

According to Stephanie Kurose, a senior policy specialist at the Centre for Biological Diversity, the Endangered Species Act is also to thank for this recovery. She said, “The act saved the wood stork and it helped preserve and rebuild vital habitats throughout the southeast, which has improved water quality and benefited countless other species who call the area home.” “The Endangered Species Act has saved 99 per cent of the species that were on the list since 1973. A hundred types of plants and animals have been delisted as their populations become stable again.

If the wood stork is delisted, it will remain protected by other laws and a monitoring plan will be put in place to ensure the population remains stable.